


Unplanned Parenthood

by nadiacreek



Series: Unplanned Parenthood [1]
Category: Glee
Genre: Adoption, Friendship, Future Fic, M/M, Married Couple, Parenthood, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:39:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 26,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nadiacreek/pseuds/nadiacreek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most gay couples need years of planning to have kids. Kurt and Blaine ended up with theirs by accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Brittany

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this around December 2012, moving it to AO3 now for archival purposes.

When Kurt and Blaine went out for a Saturday night of dancing at their favorite club, they had no idea they’d be coming home with a baby.

The club was tamer than the ones they’d frequented in their early twenties, but still fun and energetic, with a young crowd that kept them feeling comfortable at age twenty-six. They were friendly with the manager, who let Blaine sing a song or two during the DJ’s breaks sometimes. But tonight there was live music, a band from Chicago they’d never heard of before but immediately took a liking to when they heard the beat echoing through the door and onto the street outside.

They presented their ID’s, put on neon wristbands, and headed to the dance floor immediately. It was Kurt who first recognized the familiar smile of one of the band’s backup dancers. “Blaine! Is that Brittany?”

It was unmistakably her, once they moved close enough to get a good look. She was as energetic and precise in her movements as ever, completely unimpeded by her extremely pregnant belly.

“Should she be dancing like that, when she’s pregnant?” Blaine asked.

“How should I know?” Kurt asked. “Did you know she was pregnant?”

“Nope, haven’t talked to her in years.”

“Me neither.”

They positioned themselves by the stairs to the stage and caught her attention as the band was leaving for a break. “Kurt! Blaine! It’s so great to see you again! Let’s catch up, can you wait for me after the club closes tonight?”

They said they would, and then somehow ended up on the subway back to their apartment with Brittany at two in the morning. “The bed in my hotel room is uncomfortable, do you guys have a guest room I could use?” she’d asked, and it had all seemed quite logical, plenty of time to catch up and talk together.

“So, when are you due?” Blaine asked her on the train.

Brittany looked confused. “I don’t know what time the train lands. Shouldn’t you know? Don’t you take this train all the time?”

“I meant the baby,” Blaine said.

“What baby?” Brittany asked.

Blaine was flabbergasted. “The baby,” he said, gesturing at the very large bump under her dress. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t seen any storks around, have you?” Brittany asked. “But I guess that would explain why people keep congratulating me all the time. I thought it was just because I was having a lot of good hair days.”

Kurt recovered first, remembering that Brittany had always had problems with even the most basic sex ed concepts. “Britt, honey, I think you should get seen by a doctor as soon as possible. I think you’re definitely pregnant.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible, but if you say so I guess I could make a doctor appointment when I get back to Chicago,” Brittany said. She grunted suddenly. “Sorry, just a back spasm. I hope I didn’t pull something while I was dancing tonight.”

“Do you know who the father might be?” Kurt asked, as gently as he could. “Do you have a boyfriend? Or a husband?”

Brittany shook her head. “I’ve been dating a lot of guys, and girls too.” Her eyes widened. “Do you think the father could be another girl?”

“I doubt it,” Blaine said.

“Too bad,” Brittany said. “I didn’t really like any of the guys I’ve dated lately.”

The train jerked to a halt. “This is our stop,” Kurt said. He stood up and offered Brittany his arm.

“You’re so sweet, Kurt,” Brittany said, cuddling up against his side as they stepped onto the platform.

It was a short walk to their apartment building, only a block. Kurt and Blaine waved at the night doorman as they entered. “Congratulations!” he called to Brittany.

“Thanks!” Brittany said, flashing him a huge smile. “See what I mean?” she said, turning back to her friends. “He totally thinks my hair is awesome. Wow! I’ve never seen this many buttons on an elevator before!”

They lived on the thirty-seventh floor. Brittany counted each number out loud as it flashed on the overhead display, Blaine gritting his teeth with each one. “Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirt—why are we stopping?” The elevator ground to a halt, bouncing slightly, and the overhead display went blank.

“Ugh, not  _again_ ,” Kurt said. “They said they fixed it!” He pressed the emergency call button. “Hi, the elevator stopped at the thirty-fourth … AHHH!!! OH MY GOD WHY ARE MY FEET WET?”

There was a large puddle of water around Brittany’s feet, slowly sleeping toward the corners of the elevator. Her dress was dripping, completely soaked below the waist.

“WE ARE IN HERE WITH A PREGNANT WOMAN AND HER WATER JUST BROKE!” Kurt screamed into the speaker.

“Okay, sir, I am calling the paramedics and the elevator repair service right now.”

Brittany was bent over at the waist, moaning. Blaine was holding her arm. “Britt, I think you should sit down. Can you sit down? I know the floor is wet, but your dress is all soaked anyway, so I don’t think it makes much difference and you’d be more comfortable. I think. Don’t you think?”

Kurt took two deep breaths, trying not to hyperventilate, as Blaine coaxed Brittany into sitting down on the floor. He decided it would be bad form to mention how much his shoes and pants, now covered in amniotic fluid, had cost. “This is not happening,” he said, rocking slightly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “This is not supposed to happen in real life. This only happens in bad movies, and my life is not a bad movie, it is a good movie with a happy ending, and this is not happening to me.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Blaine said. “It takes a long time for a baby to come. Hours and hours, usually. They’ll have us out of this elevator way before anything happens. Trust me, I know about these things, my dad is a doctor.”

“Your dad is a  _cardiologist_ ,” Kurt said.

“Which is a kind of doctor,” Blaine insisted.

“I have a strong urge to push,” Brittany said, her voice surprisingly calm.

“That means the baby is almost out,” Blaine said. “If you feel an urge to push, you should do it. It can be dangerous not to.”

“I thought you said it would take hours!” Kurt shouted. “That was not hours! That was like two minutes!”

“It usually does, but sometimes not,” Blaine said apologetically.

Brittany made a loud grunting noise, her muscles straining.

“Oh… you should probably take off your underwear,” Blaine told her.

“I thought you were gay, Blaine Warbler. Why are you trying to get into my pants?”

“So the baby doesn’t get trapped in them,” Blaine said, trying not to roll his eyes.

“Oh, okay.” Brittany wiggled out of her underwear and then leaned back, propping her upper body on her elbows. She groaned, pushing again.

“Oh my god, I can see its head,” Kurt said, on the verge of panic. “There should not be a head in that location, I am sorry.”

“Kurt!” Blaine admonished. He knelt down between Brittany’s legs. “Okay, one more push, ready?”

“Gaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!” Brittany screamed, and a tiny, slippery baby suddenly popped into Blaine’s hands.

Blaine stared at the baby in his arms, his eyes wide. “This is the most amazing thing ever in the entire world,” he said.

Kurt gawked, his eyes bugging out of his head. “That is a baby,” he said to nobody in particular. “That is a little tiny baby, and it is right here and it was not here five seconds ago, oh my god.”

Brittany stared up at the three of them from the floor. “Is it over?” she asked, panting.

The elevator doors slowly pushed open, inch by inch. A woman in an EMT uniform stepped inside and gently took the baby from Blaine, inspecting it carefully as it let out a shrill cry. Another woman tended to Brittany on the floor. A strong man dressed in firefighting garb guided a stunned Kurt and Blaine out of the elevator so the paramedics would have more space.

“He looks perfectly healthy, but we’d like to take mom and baby to the hospital for some routine tests, just in case,” the EMT holding the baby said. “Which one of you is the father?”

“They both are,” Brittany said.


	2. Wait

It was six in the morning, and Kurt and Blaine had both been awake for going on twenty-four hours. The stubble on their chins, Blaine’s a bit more prominent than Kurt’s, proved it, as did the faint smell of dried sweat from their night of dancing at the club.

The waiting room of the labor and delivery area of the hospital was empty, save for the two of them, a set of nervous-looking grandparents, and a bored receptionist. They’d been here for hours with no news, not allowed in the mom-and-baby room outside of visiting hours, but reluctant to leave Brittany all alone.

Kurt swallowed the last bit of his double-shot espresso. “We can’t, you know,” he said, breaking the silence.

Blaine looked up from the five-month-old issue of Sports Illustrated he’d been paging through. “Of course not,” he said. “We’ll have to think of how to let Brittany down gently.”

“It would be a crazy thing to do,” Kurt said. “For one thing, we’re much too young. Much too young. Only twenty-six.”

Blaine nodded. They’d been to his five-year McKinley reunion last summer, and Kurt’s the year before, and both times, almost half of their former classmates had been showing off pictures of their kids. Some of them even had more than one kid. He and Kurt had smiled politely and cooed over their sometimes dubious adorableness. Then they’d gone home to have loud, wild sex and congratulate each other on their mutual decision, before they’d gotten married, to wait until they were thirty before even discussing whether to have children.

“We’re just starting out in our careers, too,” Kurt continued. His voice sounded much more certain than his eyes looked, Blaine noticed. “A baby could throw things off the rails for years. Maybe forever, if we’re not established enough to take some time off and manage a comeback. You’re well on your way to stardom, and I’ve finally found a place that makes me happy, and we wouldn’t want to jeopardize any of that.”

Blaine closed his magazine and set it down on the end table. It was true, he was living his dream. After graduating from NYADA, he’d been in a few unsuccessful small productions before being cast in a big role for what turned out to be the surprise hit musical of the season. He still couldn’t believe he’d been nominated for a Tony Award, for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Rachel was out of her mind with jealousy, though she’d never admit it. But he’d just come off a year-long run with that show, and he’d been cast as a short-term replacement for Mark in  _Rent_  two months in advance, with nothing to do in between.

“That’s true,” Blaine said. “In the grand scheme of things, early in our careers is a bad time to take a break. But when you think about it, right this minute is not terrible. I’ve got this two-month break between projects, and once you’re done with  _Rinaldo_  the company shuts down for the whole summer, right when I go back for  _Rent_. The baby would be five months old before we’d need full-time childcare.” Kurt was staring at him. “I mean, not that we necessarily should,” Blaine added quickly. “Just that we could. If we wanted to. It’s still a crazy idea. Completely crazy.”

Kurt opened his mouth to speak, but a woman’s voice interjected before he could say anything.

“I don’t mean to butt into something that’s none of my business, except that I totally do.” It was the grandmotherly woman sitting halfway across the room, and she had a kind smile on her face. “I have no idea what your situation is, but I’ve been sitting here watching you be adorable and kind of stunned for the past two hours and I just want to say, there’s never a good time to have a baby. If you’re waiting for a good time, you’ll never find it, life just keeps on happening. I found out I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, Jennifer, on the day Greg here lost his job.” She tapped her hand fondly against her husband’s leg. “But it all worked out, he found another one and we got by, and here she is, all grown up and having her second baby. And she said when she moved to New York that she’d only have one! Things change, you know? None of us would trade it for the world, right, Greg?”

Greg blushed and looked at his feet. “I don’t know why you always have to talk to strangers like that,” he mumbled.

“Go on, Greg, tell them you’re happy,” she said, nudging his shoulder with hers.

He looked up at them. “I’m very happy. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. Except for my nosy wife!” He took a sip of his coffee, his eyes twinkling.

“Hah!” She laughed with the playful and easy teasing of a long-married couple. “If I were like you, never talking to anybody, we’d never make friends at all.”

Kurt smiled despite himself. Blaine gave the woman a little wink.

“Even if we do find a good time, there might not be a baby for us right then,” Kurt said slowly. “Remember what Phil and Robert went through? They waited two years for someone to give them a baby. Two years! They went through hell with it, that one birth mother who they almost adopted from and then she changed her mind at the last minute, god, Robert would burst into tears at the drop of a hat for  _months_  after that.”

Blaine nodded. “And here’s Brittany just dropping a baby into our laps,” he said softly.

“Almost literally!” Kurt said, and they both collapsed into laughter at what had happened a few hours ago in the elevator. The tension had been so huge and the endless waiting at the hospital had been nothing but nervousness, and now, finally, the ridiculousness of the whole situation finally hit them and they could not stop laughing.

“Kurt Hummel?” a nurse called out, punctuated by the alarmed door slamming shut behind her.

The laughter cut off immediately. “Yes?” Kurt answered, standing up.

“You can come in now, to see Brittany and the baby.”

“Okay,” he said, the nervousness returning. He and Blaine walked toward the door.

“Oh, sorry,” the nurse said to Blaine. “Just the dad, no other visitors until eight.”

Kurt froze. “The  _what_?”

“You’re the dad, right?” the nurse asked, confused. “Brittany listed your name on the birth certificate form.”

“She did  _what?_ ”


	3. Head

Blaine had wanted to ask Kurt to stay in the waiting room with him. He really did not want to be alone with his thoughts right now. But Brittany needed someone with her more than he did, so he’d let Kurt walk through the door with the nurse.

Blaine turned back toward the seating area. Maybe he could call someone … Cooper, or his mother, or one of his friends? It seemed wrong to tell anyone what was going on yet, not before he’d really talked it through with Kurt. Besides, it was too early in the morning to bother anyone. He headed back to the chair he’d been sitting in before, but then changed his mind and sat down directly across from the couple they’d been talking to. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to strangers than to friends, he thought. “My name’s Blaine,” he said.

“Debbie,” the woman said. “And this is Greg.”

Blaine was going to be telling this story for the rest of his life, whether it turned out to be titled “That one time I delivered a baby in an elevator” or “How we adopted our son.” He might as well get started.

“You’re not going to believe how we ended up here tonight,” he said to Debbie and Greg. Debbie’s lips twitched into a smile and Greg raised an eyebrow, excited to hear the full story. Blaine licked his lips and continued. “Kurt and I went out dancing last night. We ran into this friend of ours, Brittany, we hadn’t seen her in ages but we were all pretty close back in high school.”

“You and your partner went to high school together?” Debbie asked, surprised.

“He’s my husband, actually, but yes, we’ve been together since we were seventeen. Married five years now.”

“Well, bless your heart!”

Blaine grinned back at her, his tension evaporating. “Anyway, Brittany was there, and she was way pregnant. But it turned out she didn’t even realize it, if you can believe that. She’s always been … well, she sees the world in her own special way. She ended up coming back to our place, but we got stuck in the elevator, and she went into labor and delivered the baby right there.”

“No!” Greg said. “You have got to be kidding!”

“No, really, that’s what happened! I was the first person in the entire world to hold that baby.” Blaine still could hardly believe it himself. Maybe this was a dream, and he’d wake up and tell Kurt the whole crazy story and they’d laugh about it together and then get up and go out for bagels like they did most Sunday mornings.

“And then—” Blaine cleared his throat, suddenly less confident. “And then Brittany said we should adopt the baby.”

“Oh, wow,” Debbie said. “That’s a huge decision to make on basically no notice. Have you thought about having kids before?”

“Not really. I mean, I guess the idea has always been in our heads that we might have kids someday. We bring it up now and then. But we haven’t ever had a serious discussion about it. It’s always been something for way in the future. We’re still pretty young. I mean, plenty of guys our age are fathers, but when you’re gay it’s … something you have to plan in advance and work really hard for it to happen. It’s not something that you can just do easily, or by accident, you know?” Blaine was starting to blush a little bit. How had he ended up alluding to gay sex in front of this straight couple in their sixties? But they seemed completely unfazed by it.

“Except, it sort of did happen that way for you,” Debbie said softly. “At least, if you want to take the opportunity.”

Blaine ran a hand through his hair. “Being a father sounds fine in the abstract, but now that I start to think about it for real … it’s really scary. I mean, what if I suck at it? What if I don’t know what to do with a kid? What if he’s so different from me that I don’t even know how to relate to him?” Blaine hadn’t understood it during high school, but as an adult, he’d realized that this was why his father had always been so distant. He just didn’t know what to make of Blaine, and had retreated from dealing with him. They got along better now, as adults, when they didn’t have to see each other every day. But as a teenager in need of reassurance and acceptance, it was pretty rough.

“What if he’s so different from you?” Greg said with a little laugh. “That’s not a ‘what if,’ that’s practically a given. Not much chance your kids will turn out the same way as yourself. Look at me, I’m a steelworker from Pittsburgh, and I’ve got one daughter who’s a pharmaceutical researcher and one who’s a ballerina. Never thought I’d spend so much of my life going to science fairs and ballet recitals, I can tell you that for sure! Still love ‘em both to pieces, though.”

“Want some unsolicited parenting advice? Because it looks like you do.” Debbie patted Blaine’s hand. “Parenting is about helping your children become who they are. Not who you want them to be. You find yourself involved in all sorts of things you could never imagine, because your kids love those things. If you do it right, it takes you out of your life’s little comfort bubble and shows you how much more there really is in the world. I don’t know you very well, but you don’t seem like the kind of person who wants to live in a bubble.”

Greg nodded. “The other secret is, every parent worries about not being good enough. But most people do just fine at it. Takes work, of course. And you’ll make some mistakes, everybody does. Works out in the end, though.” He glanced at Blaine, perhaps seeing the deeper worries Blaine hadn’t voiced. “You turned out just fine, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Blaine said, nodding a little bit. “Yeah, I turned out okay.”

“You won’t make the same mistakes.”

Blaine bit his lip.

“You’ll make different ones. Ain’t no such thing as a perfect parent.” Greg took a sip of his coffee to hide his smile. “Ugh, this coffee’s gone cold.”

“What if he’s …” Blaine hesitated, and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. He felt horrible saying this, like kind of a snob, but the idea had been bothering  him ever since he’d been holding that baby in his hands. “What if he’s not smart? Like Brittany. She had to repeat her senior year of high school, for god’s sake. What if he’s like her?”

“Smart isn’t everything,” Greg said. “You’re good enough friends with this Brittany girl that you’re thinking about adopting her baby. She must have something going for her even if she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.”

“That is a really good point,” Blaine said, sitting back in his chair. Brittany wasn’t school-smart, but she was a good friend. She could be harsh sometimes, but she’d been there for Blaine in some of his darkest moments, when nobody else even saw what he needed. And she was an amazing dancer. Apparently she’d had the sense and the ability to turn that talent into a successful career. One that was not actually all that different from his own career, despite his straight A’s at Dalton and his expensive NYADA education. Now there was some food for thought.

Blaine stood up. “I’m going to go get some bagels to bring to Kurt and Brit. Want me to get you some? And fresh coffee?”

“That would be lovely, dear, thank you,” Debbie said.

Greg fished in his pocket for his wallet, but Blaine put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “It’s on me.”


	4. Heart

“Kurt! Hi!” Brittany’s voice was clear and excited. “They gave me  _so many_  pain meds!”

“Hi,” Kurt answered, sounding much more nervous, tentative.

The nurse snapped a plastic bracelet around Kurt’s wrist. “Push the call button if you need anything,” she said, gesturing to the red button beside the bed, then flitted out of the room. Kurt glanced at the baby, sleeping peacefully in the bassinette, and then quickly looked back to Brittany.

“Blaine’s not mad, is he?” Brittany asked. “I wanted to put both of your names down as parents, but they said I had to be one of them and there wasn’t space for three people. I thought I should put you, because we did used to date and we hooked up that one time, so it’s at least possible that you’re the one who got me pregnant.”

Kurt closed his eyes for a second, trying to compose himself, then re-opened them. “Brittany, all we did was kiss. And it was ten years ago! There’s no way I’m … it’s impossible.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ll both be the official fathers after the adoption goes through.”

Kurt sighed. “Brittany, we haven’t made any decision about it yet. You can’t expect us to adopt the baby just because you say so.”

She cocked her head to one side. “But it’s fate, don’t you see? The reason I never saw any storks around was because the baby isn’t for me. It’s for you and Blaine. The storks must have been hanging around with you two the whole time, and they brought me here when the baby was ready for you.”

“I haven’t seen any storks either,” Kurt said dryly.

“You probably just weren’t looking. They’re hard to see in the city, with all these buildings in the way.”

“Brit … let’s just talk about it later. When Blaine is here.”

“Okay,” Brittany said. She leaned back against the pillows. “I’m tired, do you mind if I take a nap?”

“Sure,” Kurt said. “I’ll just go back out in the waiting room and—”

“No, you should stay here,” Brittany said. “If the baby cries, you can feed him before he wakes me up, that way I’ll get more rest.”

“I … I …” Kurt stammered. He had no idea how to take care of a baby. He hadn’t held one in years, and that had been his cousin’s nine-month-old at a family reunion, and this baby was so much smaller than that one it wasn’t even a comparison.

“Great, thank you! They left bottles of formula right over there on the counter.” Brittany pointed, and then pushed a button next to her bed, turning off the overhead lights. Plenty of sunshine still came in through the window, but it didn’t seem to bother Brittany. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep almost immediately.

Kurt tiptoed up to the baby’s bassinette. “You’d better stay asleep,” he whispered. Then he sat down on the small plastic couch on the other side of the room. He fiddled with the two bands on his left wrist, and then looked down at them and almost laughed out loud at the symbolism. One band, neon green, was printed with the name of a gay nightclub. The other, a clinical shade of white, said Baby Boy Pierce-Hummel. The two choices for how the rest of his life could go, laid out side by side on his arm.

Out in the waiting room, talking with Blaine, adopting the baby had seemed almost like a good idea. But now, faced with the reality of it all over again, Kurt panicked. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t old enough. He hadn’t spent long enough being wild and free and childless in New York. And even if he were ready, this was too fast for it to happen. He needed time. Time to read some parenting books and figure out how to change a diaper and what to do when the baby got a cold. Time to research fashionable cribs and strollers and baby clothing. Time to turn the guest room / office into a nursery. These were things he couldn’t do overnight, they would take weeks at the very least. He stopped himself all of a sudden. Why was he thinking about this? It didn’t matter, because they weren’t going to adopt the baby anyway.

A single small cry came from the bassinette, and Kurt’s eyes widened in fear. He stood up and walked quickly across the room until he found himself looking down at the tiniest little face he had ever seen. In the elevator, the baby had been squalling and red, naked and covered in icky goop. This seemed like a different creature entirely, bathed and sleepy-eyed, wrapped tightly in a blanket and wearing a hat, nothing but its round face visible.

The baby looked up at Kurt and blinked.

It hit him like a bolt of lightning. Kurt had felt this feeling before, and it stunned him as much now as it had then. He remembered every detail of it, as if it were yesterday. The moment that had changed his life forever. Ten years ago, when a dark-haired boy had turned around at the bottom of the staircase, held out his hand, and said, “My name’s Blaine.”

Kurt reached out his arm, tentatively, almost trembling, and pressed his palm against the baby’s cheek. He really was impossibly tiny, his whole head smaller than Kurt’s hand, his nose hardly more than a button. He turned his head the slightest bit, cuddling into the warmth of Kurt’s palm.

“Hi,” Kurt whispered. “Is it okay if I pick you up now?”

The baby seemed not to have any objection, though how would Kurt know? He carefully scooped the tiny creature up into his arms, resting its head against the crook of his left elbow. Kurt turned and walked exceedingly slowly, step by cautious step, back to the couch and sat down.

The baby heaved out a deep breath and fell asleep in Kurt’s arms. Kurt couldn’t stop staring at him. He was beautiful, perfect, a little bundle of preciousness, and Kurt knew he would do anything to keep this tiny little person safe and happy and close to him no matter what.

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when a soft knock at the door made him look up. “Come in,” he called, hoping it wasn’t loud enough to wake Brittany.

Blaine stuck his head in, looked around, and then entered the room quietly. He set a paper bag and two cups of coffee down on the counter near the sink, and came to sit next to Kurt. He looked at the baby, still asleep in Kurt’s arms, and then at Kurt.

He knew. It was written there in Kurt’s eyes, plain to see. It was done. There were details to work out, but the decision was made.

_This is our family._

Blaine stroked the baby’s cheek softly with two fingers, then leaned over and pressed a kiss against Kurt’s forehead. He nodded. “Okay.”


	5. Phone

Kurt’s first phone call was to Robert, to get the name of the adoption attorney he and Phil had used. The call woke Robert up, because 9 AM was a reasonable time to call on most days, but Kurt had completely forgotten that it was Sunday. Kurt listened to Robert’s squeals and congratulations and promises to bring a homecooked meal for them sometime next week (it seemed like a weird thing to do, but Kurt didn’t ask why), and then swore him to secrecy until they were ready to make an announcement.

Kurt’s second phone call was to the attorney, who answered on the first ring. She listened, and then Kurt put her on speakerphone so Blaine and Brittany could also listen to her explain the process and the timeline and her fees. She e-mailed the paperwork to Blaine so they could get started right away. It was weeks later before Kurt remembered that most people don’t work on Sundays.

The third phone call was to Burt.

“Hi there, kiddo! How’s your weekend going?”

“Um, good,” Kurt said. He was too tired to figure out how to say this properly, so he just came out with it. “Blaine helped deliver a baby in an elevator and now we’re adopting it.”

“Kurt, if you’re trying to play a trick on me, you have to realize that I’m not quite  _that_  gullible. Try and come up with something a bit more plausible next time, would you?”

“It’s not a trick, dad. I’m telling the truth.”

Burt snorted. “April Fools Day was a couple weeks back.”

“Dad, I’m serious. I’ve been awake for something like 30 hours straight now and I can barely see straight, let alone try to convince you. It’s Brittany’s baby and she was coming back to our apartment and the elevator got stuck and she went into labor, and now we’re all at the hospital and it’s this beautiful, perfect baby boy, you should see him, he’s so tiny, and we just got off the phone with the adoption attorney, and it’s all going to be done by the end of this week.”

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“Here, hang on …” Kurt grabbed Blaine’s cell phone and snapped a picture of the baby with Blaine and Brittany in the background, and sent it to his father’s e-mail address. “Okay, go to the computer and check your e-mail.”

“Why should I check my … holy crap, you’re tellin’ the truth! Carole! Carole! Come look at this! Kurt and Blaine are adopting a baby! We’re gonna be grandparents!”

Kurt heard Carole shout something in the background, and he smiled wearily.

“We’ll come visit, help you guys out with everything, I’ll see how soon we can get tickets and Carole can get the time off work, and—”

“You don’t have to do that, we’re fine,” Kurt said.

Burt laughed. “Oh, Kurt, you have no idea what you’re gettin’ yourself into. It’s gonna be great, but the first few weeks are really rough. You’re gonna need some help, someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Kurt rubbed one hand across his face. “Okay, can we talk about it tonight or tomorrow? I am so tired, and there’s so much to do to get ready, I just … I can’t even think about it right now.”

“Sure, of course. Call us if you need anything, or if there’s any news.”

They’d booked their flight by the time Kurt called them back later that night.

“Blaine? Are you going to call your parents?” Kurt asked.

Blaine shook his head. “Not until things are a bit more certain. I wouldn’t want to get their hopes up and … I would like to be less tired than this for that call, anyway.”

Kurt nodded. It could be a tightrope walk, with Blaine’s parents, sometimes. He really was not sure how they would react to this whole thing, and putting it away until later made sense.

The fourth call was to Rachel, and by that time, Kurt really could not bring himself to explain the whole thing again. “Do you have any plans for today?” he asked as soon as she picked up the phone.

“Nope! What’s up?”

“I need you to come to the hospital. Everyone’s absolutely fine, I promise, but I cannot tell this story again right now. Come prepared to spend a few hours, okay?”

“Oh my god, what happened? Is it Blaine? Is he okay?”

Kurt sighed. “I told you, everyone is perfectly fine. Blaine and I just need to go home and sleep, and … I’ll explain when you get here, okay? Call when you get here and I’ll come down and bring you up to the room.”

“Very mysterious today, aren’t you? I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

Kurt tossed the phone down on the couch, completely exhausted. “What is that smell? Oh … hmm.” He looked at Blaine. Blaine looked back at him. He looked at Brittany. She shrugged her shoulders.

Blaine pressed the nurse call button.

“Yes?” a voice said through the speaker.

“Hi … could you come teach us how to change a diaper?”

—————————————————

“Kurt?” Rachel asked hesitantly. “The sign says Labor and Delivery Ward. Are you sure this is the right way?”

Kurt smiled, waving at the nurses as they walked past the reception desk.

“Kurt?”

He opened the door to the room and guided her inside, pressing gently on her shoulder.

“Brittany! Oh my god, hi!” Rachel squealed. She ran to the bed and gave her a hug, as well as she could with Brittany reclining at a 45-degree angle in the hospital bed.

Rachel’s eyes widened as she put two and two together. “Wait – Brittany, you had a baby?”

Brittany rolled her eyes. “No, silly. Kurt and Blaine had a baby. I just helped.”

Rachel spun around and gaped at Kurt. “You got Brittany to be a surrogate for you and you never even  _told_  me?”

Kurt shook his head. “No, it’s much weirder than that.”

Blaine giggled from the couch where he was sitting, holding the baby. Rachel noticed them for the first time. “Oh my god, a baby! It’s so adorable! Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Okay,” Kurt said. “I’m going to tell this story one more time, and then you’re babysitting for the rest of the afternoon.”


	6. Together

Kurt and Blaine were back in their apartment less than an hour later. They went straight to the bedroom, stripped down to their underwear, and collapsed in bed, Kurt spooned around Blaine, his hand tight against Blaine’s chest, an alarm set to allow them just four hours. They fell asleep the moment their heads hit the pillow and woke up in exactly the same position, bleary-eyed and just able to function again, at the buzz of the alarm.

Blaine reached over to the nightstand and shut it off with a groan. He rolled over to face Kurt. “Mornng,” he mumbled.

“Actually, it’s four in the afternoon, but good morning,” Kurt said.

“Curse you and your ability to be cheerful the moment you wake up!”

“We should have sex,” Kurt said.

“Um … why?”

“Because god knows when we’ll ever get the chance to again.” They both laughed nervously, hoping that people with kids were exaggerating about how little time they had for intimacy, but they took this opportunity anyway, just in case, underwear pushed down and rubbing off against each other with their mouths locked together and their hearts pounding in excitement and terror at how their lives were about to change.

They showered and dressed and checked their e-mail quickly and printed off the paperwork they needed to fill out, and then gathered their laptops and phone chargers and some extra clothes and a few other essentials and headed back to the hospital.

It was only when they were on the train that Kurt remembered he had a ton of work obligations this week, leading up to the opera’s opening night on Friday. So they spent the train ride discussing how to work around that schedule, and by the time they arrived at Brittany’s room, Chinese take-out acquired along the way, they’d mostly worked it out.

Rachel looked just the tiniest bit frazzled, bouncing the baby lightly in her arms and pacing around the room. “Oh good, you’re back. He won’t sleep unless I do this. I’ve been walking around like this for an hour and a half, he wakes up whenever I try to sit down. And he  _cried_  when I sang to him. What baby does that? Are you sure there’s not something wrong with him?”

Kurt bit his lip, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from laughing. “You probably sang too loud, Rach. I’m sure he’ll love your voice when he’s older.”

Rachel humphed angrily, clearly offended by the infant’s poor taste. “Anyway, you take him for a while, my arms are killing me.” She handed the baby off to Kurt carefully.

Blaine was setting out the Chinese food containers on the narrow counter. He glanced at Kurt, holding the baby, and smiled. “Do you want me to put together a plate for you?”

Kurt considered the logistics of this for a moment. “Maybe it’s better if you just eat and then we’ll switch off.”

There was no way they could know it now, but the next uninterrupted meal Kurt and Blaine would eat together, without the presence of another adult caring for the baby, would be seven weeks later. They would be on edge through most of the meal, ready to dash into the nursery at the first hint of a noise to place a lost pacifier back into the baby’s mouth, and then increasingly giddy as they took their final bites and loaded the plates into the dishwasher along with what seemed like a hundred baby bottles. They would stand in the kitchen, looking at each other, and wonder what they should do next, try to remember what they used to do together after dinner. Blaine would step in close and wind his hands around Kurt’s waist and Kurt would smile, resting his tired head on Blaine’s shoulder and kissing lightly at his neck, the two of them swaying together gently, peacefully, starting to get excited. And then the baby would start to cry.

The four of them chatted happily, mostly catching up on Brittany’s life and filling her in on what they’d been up to in the past few years. It was pleasant, being together like this, old friends reunited. Rachel went home a few hours later, promising to be back tomorrow and to help out whenever they needed it.

The plan was for Kurt to go home and sleep overnight while Blaine stayed with Brittany and the baby, and then Blaine would go home and Kurt would take over in the early morning until his first costume fitting at 12:30. But this plan hit a snag at 8 PM.

“Visiting hours are over,” the nurse told Blaine. Kurt and Blaine looked at each other, their eyes wide with a little bit of panic at their carefully-made plans being upended.

Kurt looked back at the nurse. “He’s the baby’s father. I have to be at work tomorrow, and he doesn’t, so he’s going to stay the night while I go home and rest.”

“Nobody without a wristband stays after eight,” the nurse said firmly. “That’s the rule.”

“Then get him a wristband,” Kurt said, just as firmly.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” There was a touch of annoyance in the nurse’s voice.

Kurt stood up and crossed his arms. Blaine stood up behind him, a gentle hand on his shoulder, saying softly, “It’s just a standard rule for good reasons, Kurt, let it go, we can figure something else out, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay.” Kurt said, looking straight at the nurse. His voice got louder, not yelling but very clear, slow, and emphatic. “This is my  _husband_. He is the baby’s  _father_. He is going to stay here tonight  _with his son_  and that is _final_. Telling him he has to leave is not okay. Not. Okay.”

“Sir, please don’t make me call security,” the nurse said.

Kurt raised an eyebrow. “Don’t make me call my lawyer,” he answered. He was bluffing and he knew it. Blaine had no more legal rights here than Rachel did, not until the adoption was finalized. Kurt himself would have no right to be here either, if Brittany hadn’t made the outrageous claim that he was the biological father. But he was betting that the nurse would cave.

She took a long look at him, and then at Blaine, and then at Brittany. Brittany nodded. “I want him to stay. Please?”

The nurse sighed. “Fine. Just don’t cause any trouble, and definitely don’t try to leave and come back, there’s no way you’d make it past the front desk.”

Kurt’s lip twitched into an almost-smile at the victory, but he stayed silent, too angry to speak politely.

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you,” Blaine said to the nurse as she left the room. He turned to Kurt. “You should get something for her when you come back. Flowers or a box of chocolates or something. For bending the rules for us.”

Kurt was pacing the floor of the small room, trying to let off his nervous energy. “How can you … it’s not okay. That rule, it’s just not okay.”

“It’s not intended to be discriminatory,” Blaine said reassuringly.

“But it is.”

He stopped pacing, and Blaine looked up at him.

There was a sad look in Kurt’s eyes as he realized it. “We’re going to be dealing with this kind of thing forever.”

Blaine wrapped him up in a tight hug. “We’ll make it through, Mama Bear.”

Kurt laughed through the tears in his eyes. He couldn’t help it.


	7. E-mail

From: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
To: InTheBuilding@googlegroups.com  
Subject: Sorry about the mess

News travels fast, so by now I assume you’ve all heard about the baby that was born in the building elevator two days ago. I’m here to tell you that there’s more to the story! The woman in question is an old friend of me and my husband Kurt, and she cannot keep the baby for a variety of reasons, so we have decided to adopt him. Perhaps he will be the first resident of the building to actually have been born in the building! (Unless somebody has had a homebirth here, in which case we could form a club.)

This has all happened on very short notice, and we will be bringing the baby home from the hospital tomorrow. Kurt of course wants to create a nursery that reflects his impeccable style, but these things take time. In the interim, we want to ask if anyone could lend us some baby essentials for about a month: a crib, crib-size mattress and fitted sheets, changing table, and stroller. If you have spares of any of these items taking up space in your apartment, please let me know as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Blaine

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Patty Jenkins  
Subject: Re: Sorry about the mess

Congratulations on your new baby! We have a crib that we use when our granddaughter visits, but she won’t be here again until the end of June, so you’re welcome to borrow it until then if you’d like. Complete with mattress and sheets! The sheets are pink with butterflies, hope that’s ok?

Best wishes,

Patty

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Ben Kramer  
Subject: Re: Sorry about the mess

Our youngest just moved out of his crib to a big-boy bed a few weeks ago. You can have our crib and mattress to keep if you want, but we already gave the sheets to Goodwill. Crib is from Ikea.

Good luck,

Ben

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Courtney Mathis  
Subject: Re: Sorry about the mess

I don’t have anything to offer, but I wanted to say congratulations on your new baby!!!

Courtney

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Jennifer Partridge  
Subject: Re: Sorry about the mess

Oh m goodness, what a story! We have an Graco stroller that you can use with infant if you have Graco car seat to snap into it but we don’t have the car seat any more, so you’d have to find that part somewhere else. We’ve been using in toddler mode since Jayden outgrew infant seat, but he’s big enough now we mainly use umbrella stroller instead.

Let me knoe,

Jennifer

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Cathy Livingston  
Subject: Re: Sorry about the mess

That poor child. I’ll pray for him.

————————————————————————-

To: Anna Anderson; James Anderson  
From: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
Subject: Phone Call

Hi Mom and Dad,

I have news to share. What is a good time to call this week, when both of you will be home?

Love,

Blaine

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Anna Anderson  
Subject: Re: Phone Call

This sounds big and important. What is it? Are you getting a divorce? Have you turned straight? :)

Love,

Mom

————————————————————————-

To: Anna Anderson  
From: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
Subject: Re: Re: Phone Call

That’s not funny.

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Anna Anderson  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Phone Call

I put a smiley face! I was just joking! Sorry if my tone of voice didn’t come through over e-mail! :)

Mom

————————————————————————-

To: Anna Anderson  
From: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Phone Call

I don’t care how many smiley faces you put, it’s never going to be funny.

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
From: Anna Anderson  
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Phone Call

Sorry for my failed attempt at humor. It’s just, you know how much I’ve always wanted grandkids, and it’s starting to look like Cooper will never settle down, and you’re no hope either. It makes me sad so I tried to laugh about it. Sorry.

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
CC: Anna Anderson  
From: James Anderson  
Subject: Re: Phone Call

Blaine,

We have dinner reservations and tickets to the symphony this evening. How about tomorrow night around 7:30?

JWA

————————————————————————-

To: James Anderson  
CC: Anna Anderson  
From: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
Subject: Re: Re: Phone Call

Tomorrow at 7:30, good.

————————————————————————-

To: Debbie Waters; Greg Waters  
CC: Kurt Hummel  
From: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
Subject: We’re doing it!

Dear Debbie and Greg,

We decided to adopt the baby! I really don’t think we would have realized this was the best decision for us without your excellent advice. It was so fortunate that we met you in that waiting room. Can we thank you in person? We’d love to have you two, and your daughter and her family if they’d like to come, over for dessert and coffee sometime before you leave town. Maybe in two weeks or so? Let us know when is a good time, and we would be thrilled to see you again.

All the best! I hope your new grandbaby is doing well!

Blaine

————————————————————————-

To: Blaine Anderson Hummel  
CC: Kurt Hummel; Greg Waters  
From: Debbie Waters  
Subject: Re: We’re doing it!

Dear Blaine and Kurt,

We are so happy to hear this! Congratulations! We’d love to see you again. I’ll send another e-mail to work out the details after Jennifer and the babies are home.

Best,

Debbie


	8. Grandparents

The formalities were easier than they had any right to be. Brittany signed away her parental rights without so much as a second thought, and went to stay with Rachel until she was recovered enough to fly back to Chicago. The baby went home from the hospital with his “father” and “father’s husband,” and the attorney reassured them that Blaine’s second-parent adoption would be routine and could be completed within a few weeks.

They named him Colin, not for any strong reason, but because they both liked the name. Blaine confessed that he’d wanted to be named Colin when he was a kid, and Kurt confessed his longstanding crush on Colin Firth. They both laughed a little, and then put the name down on the Social Security form and grinned at it stupidly for at least ten minutes: Colin Anderson Hummel.

Kurt made a very confusing trip to Babies R Us for a shockingly large number of baby supplies, each of which was available in at least a dozen different varieties. Blaine hit up the Baby Gap at the end of the block because “it’s right there, Kurt, and it’s easy, and you can pick out his new wardrobe from the most stylish baby boutiques when he grows out of these in a month or two.” Kurt sighed and agreed, and secretly thought the romper with the penguin on it was completely adorable and the red corduroy pants were an absolute fashion staple.

Blaine retrieved the crib from Patty’s apartment, and thank goodness she stayed to help him assemble it, because there was nowhere else in the apartment to set the baby down so Kurt ended up holding him the entire time. Kurt laughed at the pink butterfly sheets and made a joke about raising a gayby, but when they set Colin down in the crib, of course he fell asleep just as he would have on sheets of any other color.

“Kurt?” Blaine called from the kitchen an hour later. “Could you give me a hand here?”

Kurt walked in, bouncing the crying baby. “It’s okay,” he said in a soothing tone. “Daddy is making you a bottle.”

“How do these fit together?” Blaine asked, gesturing to the mound of small plastic pieces drying on a kitchen towel.

Kurt’s face paled. “I bought ten different kinds of bottles because I didn’t know which one he’d like best. And then I washed them all at the same time…”

“Why do they need so many parts? Why isn’t it just a bottle and a nipple?” Blaine’s voice was on the edge of panic.

Kurt shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Colin’s wailing grew louder. They finally put one of the bottles together, but it was the longest ten minutes of their lives.

—————————————————

“Kurt?” Blaine’s fingers twitched nervously. “It’s seven thirty.”

Kurt looked up from where he’d been staring at Colin in the crib, waiting to see if he’d need a pacifier after being set down. “You can do this, Blaine. You know they love you, even if they’re not always…”

“Yeah.” They tiptoed out into the living room and Blaine unplugged his phone from the charger. He honestly didn’t know whether his parents would consider this good news or bad news. But he was about to find out. He sat on the couch and dialed their number, Kurt right beside him.

“Hi Blaine,” his father said. “Anna, it’s Blaine, pick up the other line.”

“Here I am,” she said cheerily. “So what’s the big news?”

“It is big news,” Blaine said. “And surprising. Very sudden. I … Kurt and I … we adopted a baby.” There was no sound on the other end of the line, so he continued in a rush. “I mean, we’re in the process of adopting legally, but we have him already. In our apartment. He’s asleep right now, we brought him home from the hospital today. We named him Colin, and he was born two days ago, and we had no advance notice and everything is crazy and we just … we … it’s overwhelming but we’re so happy.”

Dead silence. Kurt reached out and took his hand.

A sniffle and soft gasp.

“Mom?”

“I have a grandson,” she said, her voice breaking with disbelief.

“Yeah,” Blaine said. “Yeah, I guess you do.”

“I’m so proud of you, Blaine,” his father said.

“I … I …” Blaine stammered.

“When can we come visit?” his mother asked.

They settled on a week in August, which Anna complained was much too long to wait, but James said was just barely enough time for the baby to start doing anything more than sleeping all the time. Blaine almost laughed aloud at that, given the all effort they spent trying to get the baby to fall asleep, but when three months rolled around and Colin started to spend an hour at a time batting at toys and making an effort to roll over, he finally understood what his father meant.

———————————————————————

Burt and Carole showed up the next morning, unannounced but absolutely welcome after a night of feeding the baby every two hours. “We didn’t want you to spend any effort getting ready for us,” Burt explained after Kurt finally stopped hugging him.

“It’s a baby!” Carole squealed, throwing her hands up in the air. She scampered across the room to Blaine and took Colin from his arms with no preliminaries.

Blaine laughed good-naturedly at his mother in law. “You sound like [that XKCD cartoon](http://xkcd.com/231/), Carole. The one with the kitten.”

She nudged him playfully with her elbow, leaning in toward Colin’s face. “Yes, you’re the baby! You’re the baby! Aren’t you so precious! Yes you are! Yes you are! Ooh! I think he smiled at me!”

“The parenting book I bought says he’s too young to smile,” Kurt said, holding in his laughter.

“Nonsense! He smiled at his grandma!”

Blaine yawned, suddenly overcome by the exhaustion. Burt swooped in, pushing Blaine and Kurt toward the bedroom. “Go to sleep. Both of you. We’ll take care of everything for a few hours.”

“But you don’t know—”

“Forget it,” Burt insisted. “Both of us know more about babies than either of you, so go sleep and we’ll catch up later.”

“He likes—”

“Bed. Now. Go.”

Kurt sighed. “Fine.” He and Blaine headed toward the bedroom.

“And no hanky-panky!” Burt called after them.

“Dad!”

“Just for old time’s sake,” he said, winking.


	9. Taylor

Kurt fell apart in front of Blaine’s parents.

He hadn’t meant to, but who can ever plan when they’re going to have an emotional breakdown? They just happened to be there when it became clear that they weren’t going to be able to hire a nanny.

The nanny agency had told them as much, had nearly laughed in their faces when they explained that they needed mostly night and weekend and weekend night hours, on a schedule that changed every month, sometimes every week, and then stated their budget. The agency had said with a schedule like that, they’d need a live-in. But they didn’t have the money, or the space, to hire a live-in nanny.

They’d struck out on their own, posting ads on childcare websites and asking all the local parent groups for recommendations. And tonight they’d finished going through the meager stack of applications and found them all terrible.

And Kurt knew, of course. He’d known all along that he would have to be the one to make the sacrifice if they couldn’t find childcare. He worked more hours than Blaine, as the costume director for the small opera company as well as a performer, but Blaine brought in four times as much income and was on track for significantly more. Kurt would be the one who would have to quit his job and either find some standard job with regular, daytime hours or just become a stay-at-home dad.

Both options filled him with dread. He loved Colin, he really did, this four-month-old cherub that made him smile with delight every time he looked at him. But he needed adult conversation, he needed an outlet for his creativity, and as much as he enjoyed caring for his family, he needed to feel like he was making something of himself. Kurt had known his life would change when he became a father, but he did not have any idea that it would change so drastically and so soon. He’d had no idea that he would have to give up so very much.

His vision darkened around the edges and it was as if the world was crushing in on him, depriving him of breath and light and filling his ears with the roar of a destructive wind. So here he was, curled up on one end of the couch, his arms around his knees and his head tucked in, sobbing.

“Kurt? Kurt? Kurt, it’s okay, it’s going to be all right, we’ll figure something out, I promise.” Blaine’s voice sounded a hundred miles away, but his arms were warm, right around him, and he felt the slightest bit better to know that he was not alone.

Kurt lifted his head up, and through his tears he saw the stunned looks on James and Anna’s faces. He’d never lost his cool around them before, let alone cried, and he was suddenly mortified that he was doing so now. They seemed to see it, and they got up and walked quietly into the nursery, mumbling something about checking on Colin. Kurt gasped out another sob, unable to control himself.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll do it, I’ll quit the company, I have to. But I’ll miss it so much. Performing, and being an artist, and Robert, and Jillian, and my whole opera family.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” Blaine said. “We can keep looking, maybe we’ll find someone. Or figure something out. Or I could…”

Kurt shook his head. “No, Blaine. Don’t be ridiculous. This is it. We’ve tried everything else and nothing worked.”

Blaine bit his lip, tears welling up in his eyes, too. “If things keep going the way they’re going for me on Broadway, within a couple of years we’ll have more money than we know what to do with. You can go back to the opera then. This is just temporary. It’ll be okay. And Kurt, I’m so sorry. So sorry I couldn’t do better for you. Sooner.”

“It’s not your fault,” Kurt whispered over the huge lump in his throat. He could go back to performing, probably, Blaine was right. But the company would have replaced him by then, he’d have to find somewhere else, and this perfect situation, perfect group of people, was not likely to be replicated anywhere else. Still, he could be performing again within a few years, it wasn’t so bad. He tilted his head to rest against Blaine’s shoulder.

They turned their heads at the sound of someone clearing their throat. Blaine’s parents were tentatively walking back into the room. Kurt wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

“We’ll pay for it,” James said.

“You’ll … what?” Blaine asked, confused.

“The live-in nanny,” James said. “We’ll pay for it.”

“What?” Blaine asked again. “No, you can’t! It’s too much, we could never…”

“Take the money you were going to use for a nanny, and spend it on a three-bedroom apartment instead. And we’ll pay for the nanny. Until you’re making enough to pay for her yourself.”

Kurt’s jaw dropped. “But you don’t even like me,” he blurted out, all filters gone.

Anna rolled her eyes. “We don’t even know you. We’ve known you for ten years and you’ve never given us the chance to know you.”

“I’m … sorry?”

“Anyway, it’s not for you, it’s for Colin,” she said.

—————————————————————

As soon as they interviewed Taylor, they knew she would fit perfectly into their lives. She was short and bright-eyed, with dark hair in a pixie cut that emphasized her cheekbones and delicate jawline, and a very subtle eyebrow piercing. She didn’t blink an eye at coming face to face with a two-dad family, and by the end of the conversation they figured she was probably queer in some way, but they didn’t ask because it didn’t matter and was probably illegal to ask during a job interview anyway, even if nobody cared. She was twenty-three years old, just three years younger than themselves, and was in her senior year of a child development degree. She’d spent four years with her last family, who gave her glowing reviews and were so sad that they no longer needed her services now that their daughter was in kindergarten.

They hired her for a two-month probationary period to start, but by the end of it, they couldn’t imagine their family without her.


	10. Rachel

**Two Years Later…**

 

Rachel appeared at the door with greetings and hugs and cheesecake from their favorite bakery. Colin abandoned his blocks and came trotting up.

“Look, Colin, Aunt Rachel is here,” Kurt said. She wasn’t really his aunt, but their closest friends got the honorary title. Living nearby, she was much more present in Colin’s life than either of his uncles, Finn and Cooper, were.

“Ray-sho,” Colin repeated.

She squatted down to be at his eye level. “Hello there, little guy! What were you building over there?”

He walked back to the blocks, sat down, and started arranging them in a row. By the time dinner was arranged and set out on the table, he’d built a complete pyramid, ten blocks across at the base, tapering to a perfectly-balanced point on top.

Taylor emerged from her bedroom, wearing a wispy dress and brown knee-high boots. “I’m off! See you later!”

“You’re not staying for dinner?” Rachel asked, disappointed. They got along quite well, Taylor was a theater buff.

“I have a date!” Taylor said excitedly. “Second date, really excited!”

“Ooh,” Rachel said. “Who’s the lucky … guy? girl?”

“Girl this time,” Taylor said. “Another nanny, I met her when I was at the playground with Colin. Her little boy stepped on his sand castle.” Kurt frowned at her. “Accidentally!” she added.

“Well, have a great time,” Rachel said as Taylor breezed out the door.

“Okay, Colin! Dinnertime!” Blaine called. He picked up the little boy and set him in his high chair. They were having butternut squash lasagna, and Colin was having a deconstructed version, little cubes of squash and slices of mushroom and a piece of lasagna noodle and some shreds of mozzarella cheese laid out separately on a plate, carefully not touching each other.

Kurt handed a glass of red wine to Rachel. “Oh, none for me,” she said. “I’m trying to cut back.” He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

They talked easily over the dinner table, the chattery happiness of people who have been friends so long they’ve become family. After dinner they played with Colin, and then he demanded a song at bedtime, so Rachel orchestrated a mash-up of Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, with Kurt and Blaine singing harmonies. Colin fell asleep without much fuss, and the adults retreated to the living room for coffee and cheesecake.

“Have you thought about having another baby?” Rachel asked. “Colin is so fun, are you going to do all this over again?”

Blaine and Kurt glanced at each other. It was Kurt who spoke up. “We’ve talked about it some … but it’s such a difficult process, regardless of whether we do adoption or a surrogate pregnancy. After Colin came into our lives so easily, it just seems like a ton of work. It would be nice to have another child, Colin is so wonderful and we’d love for him to have a sibling too, but … I don’t know. We’re still thinking about it, is the answer.”

“What if another baby just dropped into your lives the way Colin did?” Rachel asked.

“Well, that would be an easy decision, but it’s not likely to happen,” Kurt said.

Rachel bit her lip. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

Kurt’s jaw dropped open. “You … what? How? Oh my god, Rachel!”

Blaine put a hand on her knee. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, her eyes a little misty, and Kurt felt a little bit guilty for letting his shock get in the way of immediate concern for his friend.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Rachel said. “I can’t keep the baby, of course, I don’t want to be a single mother and I certainly don’t want directors looking at me as a mother type. I have years and years left to play romantic leads, and I’m not going to let a baby get in the way of that.”

“Can I ask … who is the father?” Blaine asked carefully.

Rachel looked down at her coffee mug. “Jesse St. James.”

Kurt was appalled. “Oh god, Rachel, not again! That guy is toxic.”

“I know, I know, I was an idiot and it was just once and I should have learned my lesson last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. And now he’s being a complete jerk about it. Says the baby isn’t his, which is ridiculous, there’s nobody else it could be.” She wiped at her eye and Blaine handed her a handkerchief. She looked up at him with a thankful half-smile. “I could make him take a paternity test, but since I’m going to have you two adopt the baby anyway, it doesn’t really matter.”

Blaine and Kurt exchanged glances. “Rachel?” Blaine said tentatively. “Have you thought about what you will do if Kurt and I decide not to adopt the baby? I’m not saying that we won’t. Just that we have to think about it, and it’s possible that we might decide that it’s not a good idea. What would you do then?”

“Give it to another family, I guess,” Rachel said. “I definitely don’t want to raise her myself, and there’s no way I could have an abortion. This is the next generation’s Rachel Berry growing in my womb! You don’t just deprive the world of a talent like that.”

“You can’t possibly know it’s a girl already,” Kurt said. “How far along are you?”

“Seven weeks. But I know it’s a girl. Mother’s intuition.” Kurt tried not to let her see him rolling his eyes.

They promised to think about it. They promised to help her during the pregnancy, either way, and to help her keep it a secret from the press and the Broadway gossip circles. They told her to call if she needed anything, anything at all, or even just someone to talk to. And they helped her into a cab to get home, even though she insisted that she was completely fine to take the subway.

Kurt stacked the dessert dishes and brought them to the sink.

“So what do you think we should do?” Blaine asked.

Kurt looked at him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Blaine. Of course we’re taking the baby. We just need to figure out the ground rules.”

Blaine smiled. “It’ll be fun, being there for the whole pregnancy this time. Getting to plan in advance.”

“Knowing what we’re doing!” Kurt said.

“Very civilized,” Blaine agreed. He leaned in for a quick kiss.

Taylor unlocked the door and came in, preventing them from turning it into a full-on makeout session. Blaine winked at Kurt, a promise for later, in the bedroom.

“Hi Tay,” Kurt said. “How was your date?”

She sighed. “I didn’t like the band, but they’re her favorite. I think this relationship is doomed.”

“Too bad,” Kurt said. “Tay? If we had another baby, would we have to give you a raise?”

“Damn straight,” she said. “What’s going on?”


	11. Rules

Blaine’s fingers traced lightly along the back of Kurt’s shoulder, and Kurt responded with that humming noise in the back of his throat. Blaine loved that noise, it reminded him of a cat purring, but he couldn’t say so, Kurt would get all embarrassed and then it would be months before he heard it again. So he just smiled, lying there naked and intertwined with his husband, enjoying the moment.

“I must be the luckiest person in the world,” Blaine said, stroking Kurt’s cheek lazily.

Kurt smiled in vague agreement, or perhaps in thanks, insofar as it was a compliment.

“I probably never told you this,” Blaine said, “but when you asked me to marry you, I figured that was it, I’d used up all my luck. Everything else in my life would have to be neutral to bad, because I’d already had more luck than I could possibly deserve, getting to spend the rest of my life with you. But it hasn’t been … I get you  _and_  success  _and_ performing on Broadway  _and_ fame and fortune  _and_  an amazing son  _and_ another baby to get our perfect two-kids family, and it’s just … it’s just unbelievable how lucky I’ve been.”

Kurt smiled at him. “I love you so much,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

“You know, we’re about to be raising the offspring of Rachel Berry and Jesse St. James. It’s going to be a lot less calm around here.”

Blaine’s eyes twinkled. “Do you think it’s inherent personality traits, or bad parenting?”

Kurt gave a gasp of mock outrage. “Are you casting aspersions on Hiram and LeRoy?”

“I’m just saying, you and I are some pretty kick-ass parents.”

“Agreed,” Kurt said, grinning.

They gazed at each other for a while, stupidly in love, until Blaine said, “What did you mean by ‘ground rules’? For Rachel?”

————————————————————————

They settled on three basic rules. They knew that Rachel would agree to them and then break them repeatedly, but at least agreeing on them in advance would give them solid ground to stand on when she objected later.

They’d told Brittany that she could be as involved as she wanted to in Colin’s life. She seemed not to think of the child as her own at all, though, and treated him exactly the same way she treated Mike and Tina’s kids. Her interaction was mainly limited to hitting the “like” button on Facebook when Kurt and Blaine posted pictures, and occasionally commenting, “He looks just like you!” Which sometimes made Kurt want to bang his head against the wall, until he reminded himself that she meant well.

They told Rachel the same thing, but with an added catch: She could be as involved as she wanted to be in her son or daughter’s life (a daughter, she still insisted), but she was not allowed to show any favoritism whatsoever for her biological child over Colin. No fancy presents if Colin didn’t get one, too. No special mother-daughter outings. Definitely no saying that she was the favorite, ever. They didn’t want Colin to feel bad that he didn’t have the same kind of connection to Rachel that his sister did. (Or brother, Kurt pointed out, but by this time the idea of a girl was well entrenched.) So, Rule Number One was no favoritism for her own child. Rachel agreed to this happily, saying that she loved Colin and didn’t want him to feel left out.

Rule Number Two was that when Rachel signed away her parental rights, that was for real. She didn’t get to have a say in any parenting decisions, no matter how much of a presence she was in the child’s life. Kurt grudgingly agreed that Rachel could express her opinion if she wanted to, because, realistically, Rachel Berry would always express her opinion no matter how out of line it was. But Kurt and Blaine would make the decisions themselves, regardless of whether Rachel agreed or not. What schools she would go to, which activities were appropriate and not, whether to let her get her ears pierced—no matter what the subject, Kurt and Blaine had the final say, not Rachel. Rachel agreed to this, too, saying she was perfectly happy to be the fun aunt, not the mother.

Rule Number Three was really a subset of Rule Number Two, but it was important enough to state explicitly: The child would not be raised Jewish. They were a secular family and Rachel was not to impose her religion on the child.

Rachel strongly objected to Rule Number Three.

“But she  _is_  Jewish,” Rachel said. “It’s not that I want to  _make_  her Jewish. She has a Jewish mother, so she’s Jewish. End of story.”

“We’re not interested in what a rabbi would say about it,” Kurt said. “It doesn’t matter, because we are not raising our kids with any religion.”

“It’s not just a religion,” Rachel said. “It’s an ethnicity. She’s Jewish whether she knows it or not. And if she looks anything like me, everyone will be able to see it. She needs to know about her heritage. She should know what it means to be Jewish, and know about the holidays and the rituals and meanings behind them. Because it’s part of who she is.”

“Maybe you could teach both of our kids about Jewish traditions, but not in a practicing religion kind of way,” Blaine suggested as a compromise. “It’s an important thing to know about, whether you’re Jewish or not. Right, Kurt?”

Kurt narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

Rachel huffed. “Blaine, she’s one of the chosen people. It’s important.”

“If it’s that important to you, Rachel, maybe you should find a Jewish family to adopt her,” Kurt said. Sometimes a threat was the only way to get Rachel to agree to something, he knew, but Blaine tensed when he said it, already completely invested in making this baby a part of their family.

Rachel glared at Kurt. “If that’s the way you feel about it,” she said, blustering.

Kurt raised an eyebrow.

Rachel sighed. “Fine. Raise her nonreligious if you must. She’ll still be Jewish deep down inside.”

Kurt smiled triumphantly, and Blaine’s shoulders relaxed.

“Just promise me you won’t give her a really Christian name like Mary or Christina,” Rachel said.

“Deal.”

“Can she have a Hebrew name?”

“Don’t push your luck.”


	12. Pregnancy

Blaine arrived home with two containers of berries and a can of whipped cream.

“What’s the occasion?” Kurt asked.

“No occasion,” Blaine said cheerily. “I signed up with this website where they send you an e-mail once a week with stuff about the pregnancy and fetal development, and it also has this cute thing where they tell you what fruit or vegetable is the same size as your baby right now. This week it’s a raspberry, and last week was a blueberry, and I was sitting there thinking, aren’t raspberries and blueberries about the same size? So I went to the market to check, and look! The raspberries really are a little bit bigger! Isn’t that amazing? Our baby is growing! And then I felt weird just walking out of the market without buying anything, so I went ahead and bought the berries.”

“And what does the whipped cream represent?”

“Nothing, it’s just delicious.”

“So let me get this straight,” Kurt said. “You want us to eat our baby? And a bunch of other little babies together with it, topped with processed cream squirted out of a can?”

Blaine rolled his eyes. “Our baby is not  _actually_  a raspberry, Kurt. It’s just the _size_  of a raspberry.” He popped the box open and held one up. “Look how tiny! Can you believe that there’s a whole entire human being this size, growing inside Rachel’s body?”

“You’re not helping this be more appetizing,” Kurt said.

“Can I squirt cream directly into your mouth?” Blaine asked.

“I bet you say that to all the guys.”

————————————————————————

Kurt twitched his fingers nervously. He and Blaine were sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office with Rachel, the first appointment they had attended with her, getting ready for the first ultrasound. It was too soon to tell the baby’s sex, but the doctor would be measuring its growth and looking for signs of any problems. They were sure everything would be okay. Why wouldn’t it be? Brittany had managed to have a healthy baby without a single doctor visit, without taking prenatal vitamins, without blood tests or ultrasounds or anything at all. The lack of stress was probably actually beneficial for the baby, Kurt thought, though of course he knew that medical attention was very important.

“What fruit is it this week?” Kurt asked.

“Plum,” Blaine said.

Rachel groaned. “Oh god, that sounds like the most disgusting food ever. Wait, no, I take it back. All food is disgusting. Whoever came up with the idea that people should eat food was an idiot, and I hate him. It must have been a man. Men come up with all the terrible ideas. I bet a man invented pregnancy, too. Men suck.”

“Thanks for that, Rachel,” Kurt said.

“Are you eating anything these days?” Blaine asked, worried.

“Toast … sometimes with cream cheese on it. And peppermint candies, the white ones with red stripes. That’s about it.”

“Is that healthy? I mean, for the baby?”

Rachel shot him a glare and he wisely decided not to press the matter further.

Everything looked fine on the ultrasound.

———————————————————————————-

It was the cusp of weeks fifteen and sixteen, so Blaine made an orange and avocado salad as the first course for dinner with Rachel. Kurt complained that the whole concept of fetus-sized fruits was morbid, but Blaine insisted that it was cute and also healthy, which was important now that Rachel was finally out of the nausea phase and eating actual food again.

Rachel had an odd look on her face when she came into the apartment, but she didn’t say anything out of the ordinary, so they ignored it. Always best to just pretend the hormonal behavior didn’t exist, Kurt and Blaine had realized.

“So, have you decided how much longer you’ll be in New York?” Kurt asked. Rachel wanted to keep the pregnancy completely secret, which meant leaving the city where she would inevitably be seen out and about and recognized. She hadn’t yet settled on a place to go. Staying with her fathers in Lima was the obvious choice, but she was just as likely to be recognized there as in New York, what with the Midwestern appreciation for hometown heroes. They’d discussed a few possible locations, but Rachel was reluctant to spend half a year alone in a city where she didn’t know anyone. But she was starting to show, and she wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret much longer.

“Actually,” Rachel said, a guilty expression clouding her features. “I’ve decided to just stay in New York.”

“Really?” Blaine asked. “But what about keeping the pregnancy a secret? How will you do that?”

“I won’t,” Rachel said. “I talked it over with my publicist and, well …”  She drew a sheet of paper out of her purse and handed it to Blaine. Kurt leaned over to read it at the same time.

It was an advance copy of a one-paragraph blurb in People magazine. There was a picture of Rachel in a skintight black unitard, her baby bump quite visible in the clingy clothing.

**_Who’s Your Daddy?_ **

_Broadway starlet Rachel Berry is expecting, but she has no plans to be a mom! She’s carrying a baby for her long-time friends, fellow Broadway heartthrob Blaine Hummel and his opera-singing husband Kurt, who already have one child. “As the daughter of two gay dads, I am so thrilled to be able to help out my friends this way,” the lovely lady said. She told us she’ll be taking time off from Broadway during the pregnancy, but plans to be back on stage in a revival of The Music Man this fall._

Kurt opened and shut his mouth a few times, too angry and stunned to speak. “How could you?!” he shouted at Rachel when he finally recovered his voice. “You made it sound like we asked you to be our surrogate, like you’re doing us a favor, when actually it’s me and Blaine who are doing you a huge favor by adopting the baby you got pregnant with by accident! Why would you do something like this?”

“It was my publicist’s idea,” Rachel said. “And I didn’t actually say anything that isn’t true. I just, you know, let them understand in a particular way. Come on, don’t you see? This is great for all of us! I look like the most charitable person ever, agreeing to lend my own body out to help a gay couple, and you guys get cast as the adorable dads doing everything you possibly can to have a family.”

“But that’s not what happened!” Kurt said.

“Rachel,” Blaine said, taking a much more conciliatory tone than Kurt’s. “Why didn’t you at least come to us and ask us about this before you gave an interview to a reporter?”

“Because you would have said no,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Don’t you think that’s all the more reason to have asked?” Kurt said.

“What was I supposed to do?” Rachel asked, a touch of whining in her voice. “Spend six months by myself in Miami, living out of a hotel room and with nobody to help me when I’m nine months pregnant and can’t even reach down to tie my own shoes? Or go back to Lima and live in my dads’ basement and never go outside, never see the light of day until the baby is born? No thank you. This was the only way, just tell the world and spin it the best way possible.”

“This is really not okay, Rachel,” Kurt said.

She sighed. “I know, I know. I just … I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. And I’m sorry. But now it’s done and … at least I’m telling you now instead of just waiting for the issue to hit the newsstands, right?”

“When is it coming out?” Blaine asked.

“Two days from now.”

“Excuse me,” Blaine said. “I have to go call my publicist. Why don’t you two go ahead and start eating?”

Kurt looked over to the dining room table, the orange and avocado salad laid out on chilled plates. “I don’t think I’m hungry.”

“Can I have yours, then?” Rachel asked.


	13. Banana

Kurt poured a bowl of Rooster O’s for himself, and a smaller amount in one of Colin’s plastic bowls. He started to peel a banana.

“Bana!” Colin said, pointing.

“Yes, it’s a banana,” Kurt said. “Do you want some?” He cut off a few slices and put them in Colin’s bowl with the cereal.

Blaine walked out of the bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, green with white stripes. “You’re feeding Colin the gayest cereal ever?”

Kurt rolled his eyes. “Fruit loops are the gayest cereal ever. These are just off-brand cheerios.”

“I still don’t understand why you don’t buy regular cheerios.”

“Nostalgia. Poverty is much more romantic in retrospect.”

Blaine walked over to the table and grabbed a Rooster O out of Colin’s bowl, popping it in his mouth.

“And how many times do I have to tell you not to walk around mostly-naked when Taylor is home,” Kurt said.

Taylor chose that moment to walk out of her bedroom and join them in the kitchen. She gave Blaine a long look up and down, smiling salaciously. “Oh trust me, I do not mind in the least.”

“See? There’s no problem,” Blaine said.

Kurt sighed dramatically, then went back to slicing up the banana for his cereal.

“Oh!” Blaine said. “I forgot to tell you, it’s banana week.”

Taylor cracked up, nearly spilling her coffee. Kurt frowned at his now-unappetizing bowl of Rooster O’s and banana.

“Last week was a mango,” Kurt said. “Did the baby totally change shape from round to long and skinny?”

“I think it’s just supposed to be the length and weight, not the shape,” Blaine said. “But we can check for traces of banana on the ultrasound this afternoon.”

This time, Taylor actually did spill her coffee.

————————————————————————

“It’s a boy,” the ultrasound technician told them.

Kurt, Blaine, and Rachel sat there in stunned silence. They’d all been completely convinced it would be a girl.

Rachel put on her sparkliest of fake smiles. “I’m sure you must be mistaken. I’m having a girl. Could you check again?”

The technician rolled her eyes. “It’s right up on the screen here, clear as day. See here’s one leg, and here’s the other leg, and straight in between them, that’s the penis.”

“I don’t understand how this could happen!” Rachel said, throwing her head back on the examination table.

“Fifty percent chance,” the technician quipped.

“You don’t understand,” she said dramatically. “This baby was supposed to be the next Rachel Barbra Berry. A miniature little me, unbelievably talented, destined to be a star. She was going to take ballet lessons from age two, and vocal training, and she would win toddler talent competitions with her heartfelt renditions of my favorite showtunes. And now it’s just some … boy. I don’t even know who this baby is any more.”

Blaine reached out and held her shoulder comfortingly. “Rachel, it’s going to be fine. There’s no guarantee the baby would have been anything like you even if she were a girl.” He decided not to mention that there was no way he and Kurt would ever have entered her on the toddler pageant circuit. “And I have heard that it’s possible for guys to be very talented singers and dancers and actors too. Not that I’ve ever met anyone like that or anything. Just saying.”

“I’m sorry, Blaine, this is just a very difficult personal moment for me,” Rachel said. “I think I might cry.”

Blaine was really quite glad that Rachel had decided not to raise this child herself, if this was her reaction to finding out that it wasn’t a girl. But truth be told, he was unreasonably sad himself. He’d spent the last several months picturing himself as a father of a sweet little girl. They’d have a special connection, he’d imagined, a daddy-daughter bond. Of course Kurt would also be her father, but not  _that_  kind of father. Blaine would be the father who was the prince to his daughter’s princess, who protected her and became the unconscious blueprint in her mind for what a man should be. They would dance together at parties, Blaine spinning his little girl around and around in her fancy dress.

What had happened to that little girl, Blaine asked himself. She had been so real in his fantasies, almost tangible. And now she was just … gone, as if the wind had come out and blown away the colorful dust she was made of. He felt terribly sad, even as he tried to focus on the joy of having another son. How wonderful Colin was, really, and how great it would be to have another one just like him. How nice it would be for them to grow up as brothers, so much closer in age than he and Cooper had been, able to be real friends and play together throughout their childhoods. How Blaine could teach them to play softball and take them to the museum to see the dinosaur exhibits and … he suddenly realized just exactly how gendered his expectations were, and he scolded himself. A boy would be wonderful, he told himself. Wonderful. So why did he feel so sad?

Kurt was still staring at the screen, but he wasn’t really seeing anything, and he definitely wasn’t listening to the technician’s chatter about the measurements she was taking of the femur, the head circumference, the spine. No, he hadn’t been able to listen to anything beyond his own thoughts after finding out that they were having another boy.

He’d told himself not to get too invested in the idea of a girl. He’d told himself over and over, but he couldn’t resist the seduction of the idea. He’d spent the last few months looking at girls’ clothing lines on his laptop whenever Blaine wasn’t paying attention, nearly squealing in delight over all the adorable dresses. There were so many more and better things available for girls than boys, it was no comparison at all. He’d held off from making actual purchases … except for one, just the absolute cutest little white dress with a spray of brightly colored flowers that was on sale and almost sold out. He’d hidden it in the back of the closet, knowing Blaine would make fun of him if he found out. Kurt had no idea what he’d do with that dress now. It seemed almost like a shroud in his mind, the one and only item of clothing purchased for their daughter who would never exist, never be alive to wear it.

Would it be too awful to hope for a boy who likes to wear dresses, he wondered.

———————————————————

Taylor squealed with delight over the news of a second boy, and teased them again about “banana week.” Kurt and Blaine put on smiles and talked about how wonderful it would be to have two boys, but neither of them were really excited in their hearts.

Blaine wasn’t going to say anything, he felt so guilty about his feelings. But complete honesty was important, and he knew Kurt would always be compassionate and understanding. So, under the covers that night, his face hidden by darkness, he told his husband. “I was really hoping for a girl.”

“Me too,” Kurt said, and Blaine breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t just him.

“I’m sure that when our son is here, he will be perfect and amazing and I won’t even be able to remember why I wanted a girl,” Blaine said. “It’s just … right now … I feel kind of sad.”

Kurt nodded. “Yeah.”

They lay there in silence for a little while.

“Maybe we might try again someday? For a girl?” Blaine ventured.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Three is a lot. Especially in Manhattan.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, cross that bridge when we come to it,” Kurt said.

“Okay. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”


	14. Plans

Blaine plunked a can of pureed pumpkin down on the kitchen counter when he got home.

“What’s this for?” Kurt asked.

“It’s completely impossible to find a fresh pumpkin in June,” Blaine said. “And anyway, I realized I wouldn’t know what to do with one aside from carve it into a jack-o-lantern. So I got canned.”

“I take it this is pumpkin week, then,” Kurt said dryly.

“Yeah … I’ll look for a recipe for tonight. Pumpkin pie? Pumpkin cookies? I have no idea. Rachel’s coming over, remember?”

“Yeah. I’m making that risotto thing.”

“Great. Pumpkin risotto, maybe?”

“Not a chance.”

—————————————————————-

Rachel waddled in the door, moaning about how much her back hurt. She was smaller than average for thirty-eight weeks pregnant, but she still claimed to feel like a whale. She handed a stapled, rather thick sheaf of paper to Blaine, and one to Kurt.

“This is my birth plan. I’ve divided it into five sections: pre-labor, early labor, late stage labor, postpartum, and emergencies that may or may not arise. Blaine’s role is to be my labor support person. He will stand by my side, hold my hand, and tell me reassuring things about how strong I am and how I am fulfilling the essence of my womanhood by birthing a child naturally. He may be called upon to sing soothing ballads, depending on my mood. Kurt, your job is to run interference with the doctors and nurses. If they try to talk me into taking any medications or undergoing any procedures that are not specifically listed in my plan, you will be the one to talk sense into them. I won’t be able to do it because I’ll be too busy concentrating on the calming sound of Blaine’s voice and using my hypnobirthing techniques, so I won’t have time to talk to them. Please, both of you, make sure you are thoroughly familiar with the contents  _before_  we go to the hospital. I don’t want you to have to stop and re-read things in the middle of the action. All of this is very important to me. I want the birth to be perfect and natural and empowering, just like I’ve read about online.”

“Wait,” Kurt said. “Does this mean you want me to be in the room when you’re in labor? Because, I was there when Colin was born and it is not an experience I ever want to repeat.”

“But I  _need_  you there,” Rachel said. “Blaine can’t do both jobs at once. Besides, don’t you want to be there in the magical moment that your son is born?”

“Last time didn’t seem so magical,” Kurt said. “It seemed more … bloody.”

Blaine was flipping through the pages of the birth plan. “Rachel, this seems like an awful lot of stuff to specify. I’ve heard that these things don’t always go the way you expect them to, and—”

“That is what the emergencies section is for,” Rachel said. “Now come on, I’m starving, is dinner ready? Your future child requires nourishment. Oof!” She paused, clutching her belly, and Blaine and Kurt looked at her, alarmed. She waved them off. “Just a little contraction. They happen all the time. Completely normal. We should still have two or three weeks left before the baby comes.”

But they turned out not to have two or three weeks. Rachel’s contractions intensified during dinner, and by the end they were around nine minutes apart. Kurt was terrified, convinced that the baby would arrive any second now, right in their dining room, despite Rachel’s repeated assurances that she had contractions all the time and it was no big deal.

“I think we should get you to the hospital,” Blaine said.

Rachel looked at him angrily. “I will give you a pass this time because you haven’t had a chance to read the birth plan, but it specifically says on page three in the ‘early labor’ section that I want to labor at home until the contractions are five minutes apart. That reduces the chance of needing medications to speed the labor once you’re at the hospital. Trust me, I am fine—owwww! I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“But—”

“No, no, I’m fine, really. Didn’t you say there was pumpkin pie? I must say, it’s a weird choice for summer, but it sounds absolutely delicious imgoingtothrowupohmygod.” Rachel ran for the bathroom.

Kurt stood up. “I’m going downstairs to hail a cab. Get her down as soon as you can. Taylor, we’ll call and let you know whether we’re going to be home tonight or not.” He gave Colin a big hug and then grabbed his keys and walked out the door.

——————————————————————-

The nurse poked at Rachel’s stomach worriedly.

“I’m fine,” Rachel was still insisting. “I’m not in labor, it’s just random contractions and I ate too much at dinner. I’m completely fine!”

“You’re four centimeters dilated. You’re in labor,” the nurse said.

“But I’m supposed to have at least two more weeks!” Rachel said. “You have to make it stop!”

“Thirty-eight weeks is full term, we won’t stop the labor at this point. Probably couldn’t even if we tried.”

“But I left my labor bag at home! It has my chapstick and my iPod and my bathrobe and my fuzzy bunny slippers.” Rachel was slipping into a panic. “I cannot have this baby without my bunny slippers. I NEED MY BUNNY SLIPPERS!”

“One of us will go pick up your bag in the morning, Rachel,” Blaine said as reassuringly as possible.

“I’m just going to do a quick ultrasound to check the baby’s position,” the nurse said. She squirted some gel on Rachel’s stomach.

“Kurt!” Rachel shouted. “Give the nurse a copy of my birth plan!”

Kurt held his hands out. “I … um … I didn’t bring it. I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” the nurse said, looking at the ultrasound screen. “The baby is breech. You’re going to need a c-section.”

“But I don’t want a c-section,” Rachel said angrily. “It’s in my birth plan that KURT FORGOT TO BRING! It’s on page five, and again in the emergencies section!”

“Honey, this baby is sitting sideways.” The nurse shifted the ultrasound sensor over near Rachel’s right hip. “The head is over here,” she said, then slid the sensor to the left side of her waist. “And the feet are over here. Only way this baby is coming out is a c-section, I’m sorry.”

“Kurt! Kurt, tell her I’m not having a c-section! That’s your job!”

Kurt took her hand. “Rachel, I think you should have the c-section. They know what they’re talking about.”

“I HATE YOU ALL!”

——————————————————————

The hardest part was calming Rachel down enough to sign the consent form and lie still for the epidural. One the c-section got underway, everything went perfectly. The baby was healthy and beautiful, just as perfect as Colin had been.

They named him Asher, which is Hebrew for happy or blessed, but not  _because_ of that, Kurt insisted. And if perhaps they heard Rachel whispering some Hebrew words into the baby’s ear, well, they let it slide for now.


	15. Brittany 2.0

Asher was the easiest, most laid-back baby any of them had ever seen. He rarely cried, and if he did it was for a specific reason and he sounded almost apologetic about it. He loved to be carried and held, but he was also perfectly content to be set down in his crib or simply on a quilt laid out on the floor. He even tolerated Colin’s exploratory pokes and prods, which of course were always under the close supervision of an adult. In the week he’d been home from the hospital, he’d been a wonderful addition to their family.

Kurt and Taylor were watching the baby wiggle around on the floor while Colin played with his Duplos nearby. “How could this calm little being have come from Rachel and Jesse?” Kurt asked. “Are we sure he wasn’t accidentally switched at birth?”

Blaine glared at him from the kitchen, where he was putting together some sandwiches for lunch. “Not funny. Cooper used to tell me that I was switched at birth, and I was deeply traumatized. Well, not that deeply. But it wasn’t fun.”

“Aww, sorry,” Kurt said. “I was just kidding.”

The doorbell rang. “Were you expecting someone?” Blaine asked. Kurt shook his head, so Blaine went over and peeked through the peephole in the front door. “I don’t see anyone,” he said, confused. He unlocked the door and opened it a crack. “What the …” he muttered, and then suddenly screamed, “Kurt!” He jumped over something and took off running down the apartment building’s corridor at full speed.

Alarmed, Kurt ran to the door. There was a portable infant carseat in the hallway right outside their door. With a baby in it. Kurt’s eyes widened in shock. He looked up, in the direction Blaine had run down the hall, just in time to see him fling out his arm to prevent the elevator doors from closing.

“That was rude, Blaine,” Brittany said from inside the elevator. “I’m double-parked.”

“Jesus Christ, Brittany!” Blaine said.

Brittany looked surprised. “Was Jesus dropped off in front of someone’s door, too? I was thinking more like Harry Potter.”

Blaine called down the hallway to Kurt. “Brittany and I are going to move her car, and then we will  _both_  be back.”

Brittany smiled at him. “Oh, that’s really sweet, but you don’t need to invite me in. I’m just going to head right back to Chicago. All the papers you’ll need are taped to her car seat. I put Kurt down as the father again, so there’s no problem leaving her here with you guys.”

“No, really,” Blaine said firmly right before the elevator doors closed. “You’re coming back to talk. I insist.”

Kurt bent down and unbuckled the car seat straps. The baby was dressed in a hospital-issue white onesie and socks, a shock of bright red hair on top of her head. He lifted her up and held her upright in front of him, legs dangling. She stared right back at him, unblinking. “Well look at you, little pixie,” he muttered.

“Could someone  _please_  tell me what is going on?” Taylor called from inside the apartment.

———————————————————-

Brittany was sulking on the couch. “It’s all in the note I left. I don’t see why I need to be here. I was going to go out clubbing tonight in Chicago, but now I won’t be back in time.”

Kurt unfolded the note that had been inside the envelope taped to the carseat. It was written in crayon. He read aloud. “Oops! I did it again. Did you know an IUD can just fall out all by itself? I sure didn’t. Here’s my address for sending the adoption papers. Congratulations on your new baby, guys! I (heart) you.”

Kurt rubbed his hand on his forehead. “Brittany, did you seriously think you could just drop off a baby and leave? And we’re expected to just adopt it without any discussion?”

“Well, it’s your baby, Kurt. It says so right on the birth certificate. And she should be with her brother, anyway.” She looked at Asher, frowning. “Is that Colin? He looks different. Darker hair.”

“That is  _Asher_ ,” Kurt snapped. “Colin is the one playing with the Legos. He is _three years old_. Which you would know if you had  _ever_  visited after he was born. They don’t stay babies, Brittany. They grow up.”

Colin looked up at hearing his name. He dragged a large bucket of Duplos over to where they were all sitting in the living room, then chose a red one carefully and held it out to Brittany.

“Hi there! I love Legos!” She slid down to the floor, her back against the couch, and started constructing a long chain of Lego bricks with him.

“Brit, do you have any idea who the father is?” Blaine asked. He rushed to add, anticipating her response. “I mean, the biological father. Were you dating someone about nine months ago? Maybe a guy with bright red hair?”

Brittany thought about it for a moment. “There was this one girl with bright red hair, Maeve. She was amazing. So incredibly flexible. She could do a complete split standing on one leg with her other leg up in the air and—”

“Okay,” Blaine cut her off. “But no men that you remember?”

“You don’t think Maeve is the biological father? It was pretty magical, if you ask me.”

Blaine sighed. As much as he loved Brittany, following her train of thought was exhausting for him.

Brittany looked up from the Legos. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Kurt’s name is on the birth certificate, so the adoption should be as easy as last time.”

“Brit,” Kurt said. “We have a new baby already. It’s not exactly the greatest time to adopt another one.”

“I figured that would make it easier,” she said. “You’re all set up for a new baby. I read all about it on facebook, saw the pictures of the redecorated nursery and the new stroller and everything, so I figured, if you’re ready for a baby, it should be no problem to do two at once. It’s such a great coincidence, how the timing worked out!”

“Um,” Taylor said from across the room where she was playing with the two babies. “She just peed through her outfit. Did you bring a change of clothes for her, or should I just pick out something relatively gender-neutral  from Asher’s wardrobe?”

Brittany shook her head.

“I …” Kurt hesitated. It was almost as much as giving in and agreeing. It was taking the step in his mind. But realistically, what could he do? How could they say no? How could they turn Brittany’s child, Colin’s sister, away? He stood up and went into the bathroom, opened the linen closet, and dug around the back until he found it.

He returned to the living room and sheepishly held out the dress, the one he’d bought when they all thought Rachel would have a girl. “She can wear this,” he said.

Blaine stared at him.

“I really wanted a girl,” Kurt admitted.

“Me too,” Blaine said softly.

Taylor picked up the baby, then walked over and took the dress from Kurt’s hands. “It’ll be just like having twins,” she said.

“I’ll call the attorney,” Blaine said.

“If it’s all settled, could someone let me out of this cage? I want to go home.” Kurt and Blaine turned to look at her, sitting on the floor. Colin had built a square wall entirely around her. Three Legos high, it would be like nothing to step over it. Colin was sitting in Brittany’s lap, leaning his head against her shoulder.

Blaine stared at them. “Do you think Colin knows?” he whispered to Kurt.

Kurt shook his head slowly. “How could he?”

“I’m getting the camera.”


	16. Five

And so they found themselves a family of five—six if you counted Taylor, which they almost felt like they should even though they paid her a small fortune at the end of every week. They named their daughter Tess, and where Asher was calm, she was a spitfire. Tess was in complete control of her body at an early age, learning to roll and sit and crawl and walk months before Asher reached each milestone, though they smiled and cooed and said their first words around the same time. Her eyes were the same mysterious color as Kurt’s, and when she stared off into the middle distance, as babies do, Kurt and Blaine and Taylor had the eerie feeling that she was watching magical creatures dance and play. Kurt took to calling her Tess of the Fairies.

They started to get a lot of attention whenever they went out as a family. Two babies will draw people’s eyes, and it seemed they couldn’t go anywhere without being asked, “Are they twins?” Which proved difficult to answer.

“Well … their birthdays are three days apart and they are not biologically related. But we adopted them both and they’re growing up together, so, kind of?” It was way too much information for a random stranger in the grocery store.

“Yes,” was the simple answer, except that it always led to the follow-up question, “But why don’t they look anything alike?” Then the whole story had to come out anyway, and it took longer.

Sometimes they tried answering “No,” but then the inevitable assumption was that Blaine was Asher’s biological father (“You have the same hair!”) and Kurt was Tess’s (“Those eyes are a dead giveaway!”). The questions were much more awkward after this, with people shamelessly prying into their personal lives. “Do they have the same mother? Did you implant a surrogate with embryos from each of you, or were there two separate women involved?” So they gave up on “No” as an answer.

When Kurt was in a bad mood, he answered, “It’s none of your goddamn business,” and people assumed his wife had cheated on him, but at least they didn’t ask any follow-up questions.

Taylor had no problems. When she took them to the park in the double stroller, Colin walking along beside, everyone just assumed she was a shared nanny hired by two different families, and they didn’t blink an eye or ask her anything.

Colin seemed to see the babies less as rivals and more as experimental subjects. What happens, for instance, if he pokes them in the nose? (Asher cries, Tess tries to grab his finger.) What if he takes away their pacifiers? (Loud crying from both.) What if he tries to lean on the back of the bouncy chair? (Immediate parental intervention spoils the experiment.) What if he tries to give them Legos? (Taylor thanks him very nicely but intercepts the gift.) What does formula taste like? (Disgusting.)

But there were moments of sweetness also. The day Colin added “Baby Ash-oh” and “Baby Teff” to his small vocabulary. The day he offered his beloved stuffed elephant to a crying Asher. The day he tried to teach Tess, five months old, to count to ten. Hugs and kisses and laughter and stick-figure drawings of the whole family. He was so proud whenever anyone called him a big brother.

It was immediately obvious that their apartment was too small. They were at a loss for what to do, so they toughed it out for a few months, tripping over each other and having fits over the lack of personal space. Upgrading to a larger place in Manhattan was prohibitively expensive. They considered getting two two-bedroom apartments next door to each other, but that would be expensive too, and the logistics were too difficult to work out.

They talked to a real estate agent and decided to buy a place in Brooklyn’s South Slope, where the amount of space they’d need was affordable, at least by New York standards. They found a lovely place in a multi-family townhouse with a couple of extra bedrooms they could use for a playroom and office space for the children’s clothing business Kurt had started a year before.

Kurt sighed about giving up the pleasures of Manhattan, but to be honest, they hadn’t really been taking advantage of them in the years since they’d adopted Colin. Blaine pouted a bit about the commute, but it was doable, and at least they didn’t have to live in New Jersey. The space, the yard, the neighborhood were just what they needed.

Taylor came with them, of course. She said it would take more than Brooklyn to drive her away, and that she was looking forward to exploring the new neighborhood anyway. Kurt and Blaine let out sighs of relief, because they honestly didn’t know how they could ever have survived without her.

They moved to the new place the day after Tess learned to crawl. It grew on them, bit by bit, until one day they realized that this truly felt like home, and their family seemed like perfection. None of it had been planned, but they couldn’t imagine it any other way.


	17. Puck

**Three years later…**

 

“Papa doesn’t have fairy wings, and neither do you,” Colin said, annoyed.

“Yes we do,” Tess insisted.

“You at least wear your dress-up fairy wings all the time, so that makes a little bit of sense, but Papa never does,” Colin said.

It was a familiar argument. Three-year-old Tess had a whimsical nature, and sometimes seemed to live more in the world of her imagination than in reality. Six-year-old Colin was a serious, logical child. His criticism of Tess’s colorful drawing of their family this morning was one he’d made many times before. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to faze Tess in the least. Asher stayed out of the argument, quietly coloring a picture of a firetruck.

“If you don’t like fairy wings, you don’t have to have any,” Tess said. “See? I didn’t draw any on you or Asher or Daddy. Or on my little sister and little brother.”

Blaine walked in just in time to hear Colin’s response. “You don’t have a little sister or a little brother,” Colin said, exasperated. “Papa and Daddy said we are enough kids already. They said no more diapers, ever, and they were really happy when they said that.”

“It’s okay for Tess to pretend that she has a little brother and sister if she wants to,” Blaine said, doing his best to calm the dispute. “Tess, do you want to get some of your dolls and play? Breakfast is ready for you guys, you could bring them to the table.”

“I don’t need to pretend, Daddy,” Tess said. “My little sister is coming today.”

“That’s great, sweetie,” Blaine said, brushing her off. “Now come on, everyone, before the waffles get cold.”

Breakfast was just for the kids and Taylor. Blaine had gotten a surprise phone call from Puck the night before, saying he was in New York and wanted to meet Blaine and Kurt for brunch to discuss a “business proposition.” He refused to give any details over the phone, and Kurt commented to Blaine that it sounded extremely dubious. Once the kids were settled down for breakfast, Kurt and Blaine headed out to their favorite local bagel store and café to meet him.

Puck was already sitting in a booth when they got there, dressed in a tacky suit with dark sunglasses pushed up on his head. He stood up and hugged them warmly. “Kurt! Blaine! My bros! Long time no see!”

They made small talk and placed their orders, Puck flirting with the middle-aged waitress. Finally, when the food was set down in front of them, Kurt decided it was time to get down to it. “So what’s this mysterious ‘business proposition’?” he asked.

Puck looked down at his bagel for a minute, hesitating, and then looked up again. “Well, it’s not exactly business-related. It’s … well, let me start at the beginning of the story. I’ve been expanding my food truck empire out in LA, and I was in negotiations to buy this one business specializing in pie. You should taste their cherry pie, best I’ve ever had in my life, and the lemon meringue is also out of this world.”

“You want us to buy into your food truck business?” Kurt asked.

“No, no, I’m getting to the real point here,” Puck said. “So, the pie truck was owned by this super hot cougar named Mary Catherine, and, well, one thing led to another, and you know how it is, no woman can resist the charms of the Pucker-Man.”

Blaine sighed. “You’re thirty-three, Puck. When are you going to grow up and settle down?”

A wistful look crossed Puck’s face. “Yeah … I’d like to, eventually. Sometime soon.” He took a sip of his orange juice. “Anyway, she got knocked up. I didn’t even know a woman that old could get pregnant. I guess she didn’t, either, because she was all on about how great it was that she didn’t have to use birth control anymore, since it’s a sin for Catholics and all.”

Kurt buried his face in his hands. “She’s worried about condoms being a sin, but she doesn’t mind having sex outside marriage?”

“Well, her husband won’t touch her and divorce isn’t allowed, so she had to do _something_.”

“She’s  _married_? Puck!”

“What? It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

Kurt sighed. “You’re horrible, Puck. But I don’t see why you’re telling us all this. She’s married, she’s having a kid, nobody is the wiser and you’re off the hook.”

Puck looked around, fearful, though it was ridiculous to think that anyone in the Brooklyn café would know who he was. “Weren’t you listening, man? Her husband never touches her. She can’t claim it’s his. He can’t know about it at all. She’s kind of scared of him. He’s a scary guy. Big.”

“I still don’t understand what you want from us,” Blaine said.

“Don’t you see? I want you guys to adopt the baby! I told Mary Catherine not to worry, my gay bros would take care of everything.” Puck grinned as if this were an easy, perfect solution.

Kurt and Blaine both gaped at him. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Kurt finally said, almost shouting. “We have three kids already, which is plenty. They are old enough that we can finally go out and do fun things as a family without dragging around a gigantic and unfashionable and disgusting diaper bag. And I don’t see how this solves anything. Her husband will figure out she’s pregnant, unless he’s blind. And if she doesn’t want the baby, why doesn’t she have an abortion?”

“Abortion is like the biggest sin ever.” Puck said. “And we’ve figured out how to hide it from her husband. She’s going to spend six months at a writers’ retreat, working on a novel she’s always talked about writing. She’ll be gone for the whole rest of the pregnancy, and when she gets back, he’ll never know the difference. She’s had two kids already, so it won’t do much to her body, not that he ever looks. And they’re in college now, so it’s no problem with her going away.”

“Anyone could adopt this baby. Why are you so keen on giving it to us?” Blaine asked.

“I don’t want my kid out there being raised by strangers,” Puck said. “I need to make sure she has good parents. People I trust. People I can go visit. Like you guys. And Mary Catherine said that was fine with her, as long as she never has to see the baby.”

“So let me get this straight,” Kurt said. “Birth control and abortion are horrible sins, but adultery and giving your kid to be adopted by gay parents are totally fine.”

Puck nodded. “Yup. I don’t understand it either, but I’m a Jew, so it’s not supposed to make sense to me. I guess she goes to confession and gets all cool with God again afterward, or something.”

Blaine and Kurt looked at each other. Neither of them was enthusiastic about this idea, it was apparent.

“Maybe we should think about this for a while,” Blaine said tentatively.

“No,” Kurt said. “We’ve talked about it before. Our family is complete. Three kids is enough for anyone, four is just crazy.” He turned to Puck. “What do you think we are running here, The Hummel Home For Unwanted Children of Our Friends?”

Puck looked straight back at him. “It kind of looks like that’s exactly what you’re running, so … yes?”

“No, Puck,” Kurt said. “The answer is no.”

Blaine hated to disappoint anyone, he always had. “Maybe we should at least think about …”

“No,” Kurt said definitively.

Puck looked at them glumly. “What am I going to do now? I told Mary Catherine I would take care of this.”

“Why don’t you raise the baby yourself?” Blaine suggested. “I think you’d be a good father. You put on this tough exterior, but you’re secretly a very caring person.”

Puck’s shoulders slumped down. “I thought about that,” he admitted. “But … when we were talking before about whether I’d settle down? I want to, someday. I want to meet a nice Jewish girl and marry her and raise a family and make my mother happy. But that won’t happen if I’ve already got a kid around to get in the way. It could mess my whole life up. My whole future. You guys are already married, another kid doesn’t matter. But for a single guy … what nice Jewish girl would want to date me after that?”

“I’m sorry, Puck,” Kurt said. “Maybe we can help you think of something. But another baby … it’s just not in the cards for us.”

Puck looked heartbroken. He picked at his food in silence. “Can I at least come back to your place and say hello to the kids?” he finally asked. “I haven’t seen them since Tess and Asher were babies.”

Kurt smiled at him. “Of course.”


	18. Passover

Tess greeted them at the door when they got back from brunch. She looked straight at Puck. “Hi! I’m Tess. Did you bring my baby sister? Where is she?”

The three of them stared at her, dumbfounded.

Faced with no answer, Tess kept on chattering happily. “I don’t see a baby. Is she coming later? You are having a baby, right? I drew a picture this morning, and Taylor put it on the fridge. Do you want to see it?”

Blaine squatted down to be at eye level with his daughter. “Tess, honey, it’s fine to pretend you have a baby sister, but you have to remember that it’s just imaginary.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Daddy. My baby sister is real.”

“That’s quite a big word for a little girl like you,” Puck said.

Tess looked up at him. “You’re kind of a stupidhead. I know lots of words.”

“She’s sure got you pegged,” a voice rang out behind them.

Everyone turned around. “Rachel?” Kurt said. “You said you’d be here at four. It’s not even noon.”

“My oven broke!” Rachel said. “On the day before Passover! Worst possible timing. So I figured I’d just bring all the ingredients and cook over here. You don’t mind, do you? I figured if you weren’t home I’d just let myself in, but here you all are, and Puck, for some mysterious reason! This is going to be great!”

“Rachel, that key is for emergencies, not so you can come over and cook whenever you want to.” Kurt stood there with his hand on his hip, but Blaine and Puck were already unburdening Rachel of the many bags she was carrying.

“A broken oven on Passover  _is_  an emergency, Kurt,” she said.

Kurt sighed. “Fine. Come in. Just try not to be in the way all afternoon, would you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Rachel stepped into the apartment. “Asher? Where are you? Want to learn how to make matzoh balls?” She caught Kurt glaring at her. “Or anyone! Tess? Matzoh balls?”

Puck tentatively peeked inside one of the bags and then pulled out a plastic container. “Are these fresh gefilte fish? I thought it only came in a jar.”

Rachel nodded excitedly. “Fresh is so much better! They’re from a Jewish deli near my place, and they’re actually edible! It’s great! Would you mind putting them in the fridge for me? And then … we’d better get the soup broth started.” She continued spewing out orders, Puck and the kids following her around the kitchen like little ducklings.

Kurt and Blaine watched from the sofa, enjoying the ability to just sit quietly together while Rachel and Puck entertained the kids. Taylor waved and headed out the door, to enjoy her afternoon and evening off.

“How do you think Tess knew about Puck wanting us to adopt his baby?” Blaine asked Kurt, keeping his voice quiet so nobody would overhear.

“She’s a very intuitive person,” Kurt said. “She probably could tell we’d been talking about something important by our body language. And she wants a baby sister so badly, she must have just put the two things together. It’s a complete coincidence. There’s no way she knew that’s what we’d been talking about.”

“She told me this morning that her baby sister was coming today,” Blaine said.

“See? It was on her mind, and then a new person showed up and she made that connection in her head. Complete coincidence. She probably would have asked the next person who showed up, no matter who it was. Would have been Rachel, if Puck hadn’t come back with us. You don’t think Rachel’s pregnant again, do you?”

“Oh god, I hope not,” Blaine groaned.

“What’s going on over there?” Rachel called from the kitchen.

“Nothing!” Blaine said quickly. “Just talking!”

She turned back to the kids, holding a bone with a little bit of raw meat stuck to it. “This is a lamb shankbone. We’re going to roast it so it’s not raw, but it’s not for eating. It goes on the Seder plate, and we’ll explain all about it at dinner. Puck, could you set the oven to … I don’t know, four hundred or so? Where do they keep baking sheets? Colin? Baking sheets? Great … Tess! Just one scoop of raisins in the charoset, not two!”

“Our kids are so … big,” Kurt said wistfully. “Look at them all helping out in the kitchen! What happened to those tiny little babies wrapped up in blankets? Where did they disappear to?”

“Do you miss it?” Blaine asked.

“A little bit. They were so cute. I mean, they still are cute, but differently.”

Blaine got up and took a photo album off the shelf. Kurt flipped to the first page, a picture of him holding baby Colin in the hospital, Blaine sitting right beside them. “Look at us, Blaine! We were so young!”

“God, was Colin really that tiny? I’d forgotten.”

“Look, here he is just starting to crawl.”

“I remember this day at the park, he was  _so upset_  that he couldn’t catch a pigeon!”

“Aww, holding Asher after we brought him home from the hospital!”

“And here’s the first one of Tess. You look shell-shocked.”

“Yeah, well, neither of us expected twins.”

“After twins, just one baby would seem easy!”

Kurt looked up. “I see what you’re trying to do, Blaine.”

“No, no, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I think you’re right, we shouldn’t. I’m just … reminiscing. It really has been fun. I wouldn’t mind doing it again, if it came to that. But we’re on the same side here. Four kids is insane.”

“Yeah, completely insane,” Kurt said, but he sounded quite a bit less sure than he had that morning.

——————————————————————-

Rachel sat at the head of the table, and Puck at the foot, leaving Kurt and Blaine and their kids to line up along the sides. Blaine didn’t miss the tender looks Puck kept aiming at Rachel and the kids.

After the meal, after Asher found the afikomen and they all sang a song about a goat and some other songs that didn’t quite seem relevant to the holiday at all, after they’d cleaned up the dishes, someone finally thought to ask Puck where he was staying while he was in New York.

“I don’t know. I didn’t think I’d be here this late. I was supposed to drive back to Lima, spend Passover with my mom. I guess I’ll pick up a hotel room for the night somewhere and head out in the morning.”

“Why don’t you stay at my place?” Rachel suggested. She blushed a little bit. “I mean, I have a guest room, and it’s hard to find kosher-for-Passover food when you’re staying at a hotel, even if it’s just breakfast. You can leave in the morning, or after lunch, or whatever.”

He ended up staying the whole week. And when he went back to Los Angeles, it was with plans to return soon.


	19. Baggage

**_Three Months Later_ **

 

Rachel greeted Kurt and Blaine with a too-bright smile when they arrived at her apartment for brunch. She was wearing a retro 1950s-style dress and an apron, and Kurt quirked an eyebrow at her fashion choices.

“Coffee? Tea?” she offered brightly. “The blintz loaf is in the oven, it should be ready in just a few minutes.”

“Coffee, thanks so much. What is blintz loaf?” Blaine asked.

Puck answered from the kitchen. “It’s like blintzes, but baked into a casserole instead of rolled up individually. It’s an old family recipe. My mom used to make it all the time when I was growing up, and she got the recipe from her grandmother. It’s delicious, you’ll love it.” He walked into the living area from the kitchen, carrying four cups of coffee on a tray. “Come, sit down, let’s chat!”

Kurt sat on the couch tentatively. “What is going on here? You’re both acting all … domestic and weird.”

Rachel and Puck looked at each other, seated next to each other on the couch. They both grinned. “You tell them,” Rachel said.

“No, you tell them,” Puck countered.

“Okay, I’ll tell them,” Rachel said, still beaming. She turned to look at Kurt and Blaine, sitting across from them. “Puck asked me to marry him!”

“Wow, congratulations!” Blaine said, at exactly the same time that Kurt said, “But you’ve only been dating for three months!”

Rachel’s smile fell away. “Well, the congratulations are not quite in order yet, because I haven’t said yes.”

“Which is very wise,” Kurt said. “Because three months is way too short to make this kind of commitment, especially when you live across the country from each other and have only seen each other like two weeks out of that whole time. And remember the last time you rushed into an engagement? With my  _step-brother_? That was a disaster all around.”

“Kurt,  _please_  do not bring that up,” Rachel whined. Then she cleared her throat and said in a more pleasant tone. “That’s not why I haven’t said yes yet. I am in love with Puck and I am absolutely certain that I want to spend the rest of my life with him.  _Do not roll your eyes at me, Kurt Hummel! I am much more grown-up than I was last time._ ”

“So what is the problem, then?” Kurt asked.

“Puck has promised that he’s ready to change his philandering ways and commit to me completely,” Rachel said.

“I’m not even sure what that word means,” Puck interjected.

“It means cheating, honey,” Rachel said, patting him on the knee.

“Oh yeah,” Puck said. “I did promise that.”

Rachel continued as if the aside has never happened. “But my firm belief is that if this is going to work, he needs to make a clean break and get rid of all the baggage from his past. We can’t have anything or anyone around to remind him of his former life. I don’t want us to be distracted by raising some other woman’s child when we should be creating a family of our own.”

Kurt turned to Blaine and stage-whispered, “She does realize that  _we_  are raising  _her_  child, right?”

Blaine looked like a deer caught in headlights, but Rachel was the one who answered, well-aware that Kurt’s comment had been for her benefit. “Kurt, the point is that Puck and I want to make a fresh start, without constant reminders of the past. It’s what will give us the best chance for our marriage to work.”

Blaine finally spoke up, a voice of calm as usual. “I thought Puck was already looking for an adoptive family. Doesn’t that take care of everything?”

Puck’s shoulders slumped. “I was trying to, but then I decided, I can’t give up my little girl to be raised by strangers. They all look so nice on paper, but there have got to be skeletons in those closets somewhere. And it breaks my heart to think that I’ll be out of her life completely. Even if it’s an open adoption and I get cards and letters and a visit or two, it’s not enough. I want to be a real part of her life.”

“So are we here to mediate this dispute?” Kurt asked. “Why us? Why didn’t you go to a marriage counselor or a rabbi or something?”

“Actually, we’ve already figured out the perfect solution,” Rachel said, smiling again. “You two should adopt the baby! That way Puck can still be part of her life without her actually being around us constantly, and we know that you’re great parents, and she’ll be with Asher, and everything will be fantastic!”

Kurt stared at her. “Let me get this straight. You want us to change our entire lives—adopt a fourth child when we said we were done after three—so that you and Puck can enter into a reckless, rushed marriage for no good reason? And all of this after we already told Puck we were not adopting his baby?”

“It’s not that big of a change, Kurt,” Rachel said. “You already have kids. You’re used to it. You have a full-time, live-in nanny. And this marriage is not reckless. We may have only recently realized our love for each other, but we have known each other more than half our lives. We know we’re doing the right thing.”

Blaine squeezed Kurt’s hand. “Kurt … it’s a girl. A little sister for Tess.”

Kurt glared at him, but his resolve was fading fast. “Traitor,” he said.

—————————————————-

Mary Catherine didn’t want to meet them. She didn’t want to know anything about them. She just wanted to get rid of the baby. Kurt and Blaine stayed in the unfamiliar California hospital’s waiting room during her scheduled c-section, and saw the baby for the first time through the nursery window. It was Puck who brought the baby out to them a few hours later, bittersweet tears in his eyes. They flew home three days later with their new daughter.

Naomi Anderson Hummel was their first winter baby, bundled in fleece pajamas that seemed too tiny to fit anything but a doll. She had a head full of dark hair and when her eyes settled on a color, they were a deep chocolate brown. She was a lover, cuddling and cooing and smiling at anyone who picked her up or even looked at her, but her very favorite person was her big sister, Tess.

Puck hired someone to manage the Los Angeles side of his food truck business, and moved to New York with big plans for expanding the business to his new city. Rachel and Puck married in a very large, traditional Jewish ceremony about a month after Naomi’s birth, with all of their friends and family in attendance. Tess was the flower girl and Asher the ring bearer. Beth, now seventeen years old and fresh off singing a solo that led the New Directions to victory at Sectionals, was a groomsmaid.

Naomi was just past her first birthday when she met her newborn “cousin,” Miriam Idina Puckerman. “Bay!” she said definitively, pointing at the swaddled baby in her Aunt Rachel’s arms.

“That’s right, Naomi, it’s Baby Miriam,” Rachel said gently.

Naomi leaned over and gave the baby a messy kiss on the cheek, and nobody could help but smile.


	20. Cooper

**_Two and a Half Years Later_ **

 

It was mid-morning on a Thursday, and neither Kurt nor Blaine had a call time for hours yet. The older kids were in school and Taylor had taken Naomi to the park, so they were enjoying some peaceful time together at home, reveling in the unusual quiet. Until there was a knock on the door.

It was Cooper, well into middle-age now, his usual comb-over hidden by a baseball cap. He looked exhausted and pale, his eyes bloodshot. And he was holding a sleeping infant in his arms, perhaps six months old.

“What on earth …?” Blaine said, taken aback.

“I need your help, little brother,” Cooper said softly.

Kurt fluttered around the kitchen, at a loss for what to do. His first thought had been tea, something to soothe the nerves, but by the time Cooper walked into the living room, he and Blaine were already shouting at each other, and Kurt feared that the hot water might be used as a weapon. He fleetingly considered hard liquor, but of course that was a terrible idea. He finally settled on a plate of cookies, even though that also seemed completely inappropriate, and walked cautiously out to set it on the coffee table where it remained, ignored, through the heated fight.

“I had no idea, Blaine!” Cooper was saying. “I didn’t even get her number, or give her mine. She finally found me again through my agent. We didn’t know what she wanted, so we ignored her calls until she threatened to go to the tabloids. And then I agreed to meet her, yesterday, and she dumped the baby on me and left. I didn’t know what to do, so I caught a red-eye and came here. You’ve got to help me Blaine. I can’t do this, I’m not cut out to be a father.”

The baby woke up and began to cry, and Cooper’s eyes widened. Kurt stepped in quietly and took the baby from his arms, held him up to bounce and soothe.

Kurt looked at the baby’s face and his jaw dropped. “Jesus Christ!” he said, unable to stop himself.

“What?” Blaine asked.

Kurt turned the baby so Blaine could see his face. Blaine paled. It was like looking at one of his own childhood photos. The baby could easily have been his. “Oh my fucking god, Cooper, what the fuck is going on here?” Blaine shouted.

Cooper at least had the decency to look ashamed of himself. “She was an extra on a show I did last year. I thought she was cute, so I invited her back to my trailer. I never saw her again. Not until yesterday, when she handed me the baby and ran away.”

“Her name, Cooper, what was her name?”

“Esmeralda Tan.”

Blaine glared at him with a look sharp enough to cut glass. Not that he had any idea who this girl was, but the implication from the combination of Spanish and Chinese names was clear enough. She must be Filipina. Cooper had always taken after their father, and with a Filipina girl and a little bit of random luck …

“Don’t judge me,” Cooper said.

“I’ll damn well judge you if I please,” Blaine shouted back. He collapsed back onto the sofa and ran a hand through his hair. “I suppose Mom wants you to marry her.”

“She’s not my mother. She’s my step-mother.” Cooper was suddenly defensive and Blaine looked up angrily at this turn of the conversation.

“She raised you since you were  _five_ , Cooper, she’s your mother.”

“I kind of haven’t told Mom and Dad,” Cooper admitted.

“What?!”

“I was kind of hoping you’d tell them it was yours, not mine.”

Kurt nearly bit through his own tongue trying not to speak.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” Blaine screamed. “You want me to go and tell Mom and Dad that I got some girl knocked up even though I am  _gay_  and _married_? You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

Cooper buried his face in his hands. “I can’t tell her. I just can’t.”

Blaine felt a little stab of sympathy for the first time. Their mother was a force to be reckoned with. She was already eternally angry at Cooper for the way he treated women, and to find out he’d done  _this_ , and with a Filipina girl to top it off, she would be livid. Cooper might not escape with all his limbs intact. He sighed. “So what do you want me to do here? Aside from claiming that it’s mine, which I will not do under any circumstances.”

“I want you to take him,” Cooper said. “Adopt him or just keep him, I don’t know, but I want you to raise him.”

Blaine groaned. “Hummel Home for Unwanted Children of Our Friends. Again.”

“He’s family,” Kurt said.

“ _Please_ , Blaine,” Cooper pleaded.

Blaine looked at Kurt.

“He  _is_  super adorable,” Kurt said.

“You’re just saying that because he looks like me,” Blaine grumbled.

“You’re super adorable, too,” Kurt said, smiling.

Blaine turned back to Cooper. “Does he have a name?”

“Fletcher. Fletcher Anderson.”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Cooper looked embarrassed. “I guess she thought if she gave him a name close to mine, I might be happier? I don’t know.”

Blaine stood up. “I can’t deal with this right now. I just can’t. I need some air. I’m sorry, Kurt.” He nearly ran to the front door, grabbed his keys off the table in the front hallway and his gym bag out of the coat closet, and slammed the door behind him.

Kurt and Cooper looked at each other for a moment, stunned.

“You’re really kind of a dick,” Kurt said.

“Yeah, I hear that a lot from people.”

Fletcher started to cry again, so Cooper rooted around in his bag and pulled out a bottle of formula. He handed it to Kurt, his eyes pleading. Kurt frowned at him, but took the bottle and started feeding it to the baby.

“You’re sure you don’t want to raise him yourself?” Kurt asked.

Cooper sighed. “Honestly? I’m such a fuck-up. It’s too late for me to ever make it big. Every acting job I get, I’m stressed out that this will be the last one and I won’t be able to pay my bills. So to keep from thinking about it, I go party all the time. That’s no kind of life to bring a kid into. He’d be much better off here.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you went around having one-night stands without using protection.”

Cooper looked down at his feet. “Can I just … um … leave now?”

“It’s not a prison, you can walk out the door. And yeah, if you abandon the baby here we’ll take care of him and we won’t call the cops on you or anything. But I’d suggest staying if you ever want Blaine to speak to you again.”

“Yeah,” Cooper mumbled.


	21. Family

Kurt busied himself for a few minutes setting up for their unexpected guests. He pulled the Pack N’ Play out of the closet and set it up in Taylor’s room for Fletcher to sleep in, then folded out the futon in the office for Cooper. He found a swaddling blanket under a pile of towels in the linen closet, and set the baby down for his nap. He left the door cracked open so he could hear if Fletcher started to cry, and then went to the kitchen to make some sandwiches for lunch.

Cooper hovered around, unsure of what to do. “Can I, um, help with something?” Kurt tossed him a bag of baby carrots and he set out a handful on each plate.

Taylor and Naomi burst through the door, a flurry of taking off shoes and putting playground toys back in the bin. “Don’t forget to wash your hands before you touch anything!” Taylor called as Naomi ran into the living room.        She saw Cooper and froze.

“Hi Naomi,” Kurt said in a cheery tone. “Do you remember Uncle Cooper? We saw him at Christmas, remember?”

“Coo-poe,” Naomi said, still suspicious.

“Come on, wash your hands and then we can eat. Sandwiches are all ready.” Kurt turned to Taylor. “Surprise extra baby tonight.”

Taylor raised one eyebrow.

“We’ll talk about it later. He’s napping.”

“Mm-hmm,” Taylor said, sitting down at the table. “Use soap, Naomi, I saw that!”

Kurt’s phone buzzed in the middle of lunch. It was a text from Blaine.  _Do you need me to come home?_

Kurt texted back.  _We’re fine. Let him sit in the corner and think about what he’s done. Talk to you tonight, love you._

 _Thank you, you’re an angel._  Kurt smiled.

When the kids got home from school, they were overjoyed to see their Uncle Cooper. Kurt stood back, grinning, and let them attack him in a giant pile of hugs. “Whoa! Whoa! Come on! Let a guy breathe over here!” Cooper called out playfully.

Fletcher was playing with a rattle on the floor of the living room. Tess looked at him thoughtfully. “I expected he’d be smaller,” she said.

“Is he our cousin? What’s his name?” Colin asked.

“Fletcher,” Kurt answered. “He’ll be staying here for a little while. I’m not sure how long yet.”

Kurt had to leave for the theater soon after, leaving Taylor in charge of five children and Cooper. “You should take Fletcher with you to pick up Chinese food or something, let Cooper deal with the others,” Kurt whispered to Taylor right before he left. “Take your time. See if you can arrange for Naomi to have a dirty diaper.”

Taylor laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Cooper asked.

“Nothing!” Taylor called.

———————————————-

Blaine got home before Kurt. He was already lying in bed staring at the ceiling when he heard Kurt unlock the door and tiptoe through the house to the bedroom, trying not to wake anyone. It was around one in the morning, not unusual for a performance night.

“Hey,” Kurt said quietly. “You doing okay?”

Blaine sighed. “No, not really.”

“Let me just change and use the bathroom and then we can talk, okay?”

Blaine nodded.

Kurt slid under the covers a few minutes later, in a t-shirt and boxer briefs. He turned or his side, facing Blaine, and kissed him lightly on the temple before propping himself up on one elbow. He waited, understanding that Blaine would need to vent for a minute before they could have a real discussion.

“I cannot  _believe_  him,” Blaine said. “I mean, seriously. How could he? Did he really expect that I’d just say the kid was mine? Was he joking? Has he no … what’s the word I’m looking for? Respect? Decency? Honor? Brains? God, sometimes I can’t even believe I’m related to him.”

“I know, baby,” Kurt said in a soothing tone, patting him on the shoulder.

“Thinking he could just come in here like that and drop off a baby. Jesus.”

“Well, to be fair, that’s pretty much what the girl did to him, so …”

“Yeah, but it’s  _his_ , not  _ours_. Not our problem. Not our responsibility.”

“I know,” Kurt said quietly. This would go better if Blaine talked himself around than if Kurt tried to push for the right solution. They’d been married long enough for Kurt to know this.

Blaine pushed his hair back from his forehead and took a deep breath. “Somebody has to be responsible, though.”

Kurt hummed softly.

“I feel sorry for the poor kid, if Cooper tries to raise him,” Blaine said. “He’s a mess, and he’ll be a mess of a father. I mean, he tries. He just doesn’t understand how anyone’s needs could be as important as his own. And that’s a disaster for parenting.”

Kurt nodded.

“Maybe we could help somehow,” Blaine continued. “Maybe just for a little while? I don’t know. Keep Fletcher with us until Cooper can get his act together?”

“Do you think he’ll actually manage to get his act together?” Kurt asked.

Blaine sighed. “I don’t know. But I don’t think I can deal with adopting him outright. Five kids is unthinkable. We could practically stage our own production of The Sound of Music.”

Kurt laughed. “I get to be Julie Andrews.”

Blaine smiled at him, his mood considerably lightened. “You’re just the same as you always were.”

Kurt smiled back. “So are you.”

———————————————-

In the morning, Cooper agreed to the plan they’d come up with. Fletcher would stay with Kurt and Blaine while Cooper went back to Los Angeles to pull his life together. He would quit acting and find a stable job with a steady salary, either in Los Angeles or maybe back in Ohio. He’d send a token amount of child support each month, which Kurt and Blaine didn’t need, but they wanted Cooper to get in the mindset of providing for his own child. As soon as he felt ready, Cooper would take Fletcher back to live with him. Cooper looked extremely relieved as he left their apartment to head back to Los Angeles.

Blaine got a phone call from Cooper about two weeks later. “I know I said I’d give up acting, but I just found out my name is in the running for the next season of Dancing with the Stars. This could restart my entire career. People have made major comebacks out of this show. I need to stay around, at least see if I can give it a shot.”

It didn’t work out, but then there was another call. “It’s not just one commercial. It’s an entire series of commercials. Steady work. Could last a year, or even more. It’s definitely worth doing.”

“I got cast in a pilot, Blaine! I don’t think you understand what this means! Sure, the show might not get picked up, but what if it  _does_? It would be _amazing_!”

The child support checks stopped coming after three months. Cooper stopped calling with excuses after six.

Fletcher was a natural showman, even as a baby and toddler. In a house full of people, he always found a funny way to become the center of attention – singing nonsense words and doing a little dance, making sculptures out of his mashed potatoes, telling a joke that was hilarious despite making no sense whatsoever. He wormed his way into everyone’s hearts immediately.

It was five years before Fletcher officially became a Hummel. But he was Kurt and Blaine’s son long before then.


	22. Life

Blaine sounded exasperated as he talked into the phone. “No, they’re great offers. Fantastic shows, both of them. I just … I’m  _tired_. I don’t know what I want to do. Can you hold them off for another week? I just need to rest and think for a while. I know they’re bugging you for an answer, I understand, I just … Thank you so much, you’re a doll.” He hung up the phone and sighed.

Kurt looked up from the stack of paperwork on the desk. It was giving him a headache and tying his stomach in knots at the same time, and now Blaine was upset about something too. “What’s wrong, hon?” Kurt asked.

Blaine leaned back against the wall of the office. “I might as well admit it. To myself, even. I’ve been thinking it for a while, but not letting myself really face it. I don’t want this anymore.  This high-powered New York life, performing in a show every single night and never getting to see you and the kids for more than a couple of hours a day. It was different when they were younger and they were around all morning, but this fall  _four_  of them will be in school, everyone but Fletcher, and … and don’t get me started on the schools.”

Kurt laughed bitterly. One stack of paper in front of him was kindergarten applications for Naomi, and the other was the much more complicated middle school applications for Colin. They wanted to send him to a school that specialized in math and science, but the pros and cons of the various schools available were dizzying and the price tags … they were grateful that they didn’t need to worry about money on a daily basis like many families did, that they could afford the best for their kids, but sending five children to private school for thirteen years and then college was not an easy thing, even for them. New York tuitions made Dalton Academy look like a bargain.

“The school thing is way more obnoxious and difficult than it has to be,” Kurt agreed. “But what can you do? It’s New York. There’s no real alternative.”

“That’s just it,” Blaine said. “It’s New York. It’s this lifestyle. It’s hardly getting to see our kids. Working all the time, and everything so expensive, and … I miss Taylor, everything seemed so much easier when she was here.”

Kurt nodded. Taylor had gotten married a year ago, when Fletcher was almost two. Her husband was a sweet, gentle, extremely smart man with the endlessly amusing name of Taylor. The two of them had moved to Denver – his hometown – right after the wedding to start a preschool with her childcare knowledge and his business degree. Kurt and Blaine were thrilled at her happiness, but they missed her more than either of them cared to admit. Their new nanny, Sarah, was very nice and excellent at her job, but she just wasn’t the same. Taylor was part of their family, and Sarah just … wasn’t.

“Sarah’s only been with us a year,” Kurt said. “It’s not fair to compare her to Taylor. Our family grew up with her, for ten years. Sarah will grow on us. Or if you don’t think she will, we could find someone new.”

Blaine shook his head. “That’s not it, though. I’m tired of all of it. I don’t want this lifestyle anymore. I … I want to give up the theater. I want us to leave New York, move somewhere else. Somewhere with a slower pace, where we can send our kids to public school. Or at least to private schools that don’t require you to sell your soul for the tuition and also donate huge sums every year. I want to have family dinners every night and take the kids to the park on weekend afternoons. I want to start relaxing and enjoying life.”

Kurt looked at him, shocked. New York had always been his dream. No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. New York had always been  _Kurt’s_  dream. But he hadn’t stopped to think about it for a few years. He hadn’t thought about whether the reality of his life in New York matched up with the expectations he’d had as a teenager in Ohio. Or whether he’d lived that dream long enough, and was ready to move on to a new one.

Blaine’s dream hadn’t been New York, not specifically. It had been  _performing_. Which he was now saying he wanted to give up.

“Blaine, honey … I’m trying to understand. Performing has always been your dream. Being up there on stage … and you’re at the top of your game. You could be cast in pretty much any show you wanted. Your reviews are always fantastic, and … who will you be if you’re not performing? What will you do?”

Blaine’s eyes shone. “Remember back in high school and college, I used to spend hours just sitting at the piano or with my guitar, fooling around and making stuff up? I want to have time for that again. Write songs, and maybe perform at small venues … record an album if enough people like it, I don’t know. Broadway is great, but it’s not  _me_. It’s telling other people’s stories. I’m … I’m just tired of it. I want to find  _me_  again.”

“Is this a mid-life crisis?” Kurt asked jokingly.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Blaine sighed. “We should forget it. I can’t ask you to give up the opera and just move away with me to god knows where.”

Kurt tapped his pen on the desk thoughtfully, eyeing the stacks of school applications. “I don’t think I’d mind it so much,” he said. “I’ve been working two jobs for years now, the opera and the kids’ clothing business, and let’s face it, the fashion design is more interesting  _and_  has brought in more money for the past four years. I don’t need to be in New York to do kids’ fashion. And … maybe I could join a chorus or give concerts or something.” He laughed. “Maybe I could sing backup vocals on the songs you write.”

Blaine grinned at him. “I’ll write leads for you if you want them.”

“We’ll see,” Kurt said, smiling.

They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

“Are we really doing this?” Kurt asked.

“Let’s … start thinking about it. Planning. It’s a big decision to make based on one conversation.”

Kurt nodded. “Okay. But if this is what you want, I’m all in.”

_————————————————_

 They bought a huge, completely renovated house in Provincetown with a view of the water and enough rooms for each child to have their own. They spent the first month twirling around in the place at random, giddy over the huge amounts of space and the high ceilings and the fresh, clean air. They couldn’t believe it was really theirs.

They hired a new nanny, Abby, who was also a certified lifeguard so they’d feel safe when she took the kids swimming. She still wasn’t Taylor, but she was fantastic and they all got along great. With their new work arrangements, they only needed her during the day and occasional evenings when they went out, so she didn’t live with them.

Blaine gave his first performance of original music at a local coffee shop’s open mic night, carefully not telling anyone his last name. The crowd loved him. Kurt started a madrigals group, just for fun.

The kids were sad to leave their friends, but they were excited to live _practically at the beach, omg!!!!!_  They fit in easily at their new schools and found new friends quickly.

They took weekend trips to New York whenever they felt like it, enjoying the city more now that it was not part of their daily existence. And they flitted off to Boston and Lima and even Los Angeles on a moment’s notice, now that they were both working for themselves and didn’t have to show up at a particular place at any particular time, most of the time. It was heavenly.

_————————————————_

One snowy night in January, the whole family was gathered around the fireplace, mugs of hot chocolate close at hand. Kurt looked up from the novel he was reading and watched the kids for a few minutes—Colin and Asher working on a model rocketship, Tess reading a fairy story she’d written to Naomi and Fletcher. Blaine was beside him on the couch, reading a magazine, leaning against Kurt’s side.

Kurt turned to his husband and spoke quietly. “If you’d told me when I was seventeen that this is how my life would turn out, I would have been horrified.”

Blaine smiled. “It’s not so bad, is it?”

Kurt laughed softly. “No. It’s perfect.”

“I never would have expected this either,” Blaine said. “But really, it’s just another version of the dream I’ve always had. Love and family and music and happiness.”

Kurt stifled a giggle, and said with a completely straight face, “Would you say that I make you feel like you’re living a teenage dream?”

Blaine laughed out loud, drawing the kids’ attention.

“What’s so funny, Daddy?” Naomi asked.

Blaine reached out and petted her hair. “Your Papa. He’s the best.”

She nodded seriously and the kids went back to their playing.

Blaine leaned his face close to Kurt’s ear. “Don’t ever look back,” he whispered.


End file.
